Brief Report
Boundary conditions and buffering effects: Does depressive symptomology moderate the effectiveness of self-distancing for facilitating adaptive emotional analysis?

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Abstract

Recent findings indicate that a critical factor determining whether people’s attempts to adaptively analyze negative experiences succeed or fail is the type of self-perspective (self-immersed vs. self-distanced) they adopt while analyzing negative feelings. The present research examined whether these findings generalize to individuals displaying high levels of depression symptoms who are particularly vulnerable to rumination. Findings revealed that the effectiveness of self-distancing for attenuating emotional reactivity increased linearly with depression symptoms. Moreover, mediation analysis revealed that participants tendency to recount vs. reconstrue their experience accounted for the regulatory effects of self-distancing on emotional reactivity regardless of depression symptoms.

Introduction

Increasing people’s ability to reconstrue negative emotional experiences in ways that promote cognitive change is a central goal of various forms of cognitive therapy (e.g., Beck et al., 1979, Ellis, 1962, Kelly, 1955). Despite the critical importance of this process, decades of research indicate that it often escapes clinically depressed and dysphoric individuals when it is most needed – when negative feelings are intense and people are motivated to understand their feelings in order to improve them. Rather than facilitating adaptive self-reflection, focusing on one’s feelings under such circumstances often gives rise to vicious cycles of rumination in which people focus repeatedly and passively on negative feelings in ways that serve to maintain and exacerbate depressive episodes (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991, Teasdale, 1988).

Although classic conceptions of rumination suggest that any attempt by dysphoric and clinically depressed individuals to analyze negative emotions should overwhelm them with negative affect (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991; for review, see Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008), an emerging line of research indicates that the relationship between emotional analysis and rumination is more nuanced by demonstrating the psychological conditions under which “asking why” may protect against rather than trigger rumination (Ayduk and Kross, 2008, Ayduk and Kross, 2009, Kross, 2009, Kross and Ayduk, 2008, Kross et al., 2005). Findings from this research program indicate that directing individuals to analyze feelings surrounding negative autobiographical experiences from a self-distanced perspective (i.e., self as observer, [distanced-analysis from hereon]) leads individuals to focus relatively less on recounting the emotionally evocative details of their experience (i.e., what happened) and relatively more on reconstruing it in ways that promote insight and closure compared to individuals who analyze their feelings from a self-immersed perspective (i.e., through one’s own eyes [immersed-analysis from hereon]).1 This shift in the content of peoples’ thoughts about their past experiences (less recounting and more reconstruing), in turn, leads to lower levels of emotional reactivity (Kross and Ayduk, 2008, Kross et al., 2005; also see Kross, Davidson, Weber, & Ochsner, 2009). Over time, distanced-analysis has been shown to buffer people against prolonged cardiovascular reactivity (Ayduk & Kross, 2008) rumination, and future negative affect (Ayduk and Kross, 2009, Kross and Ayduk, 2008).

The negative affect and rumination buffering effects of distanced-analysis have been observed relative to a variety of theoretically relevant comparison conditions (immersed-analysis; distraction) using an array of explicit, implicit, and physiological measures in both single-session and longitudinal designs (for review, see Kross, 2009). Collectively, these findings demonstrate that the benefits associated with distanced-analysis are neither a function of experimenter demand nor of cognitive avoidance (for discussion, see Ayduk and Kross, 2009, Kross and Ayduk, 2008). More generally, they provide evidence indicating that self-distancing aids people in their attempts to adaptively analyze negative experiences. A key issue that has not been addressed by this line of research, however, is whether the emotion-regulatory effects of distanced-analysis generalize to individuals who are particularly vulnerable to rumination and therefore stand to gain the most from implementing this technique.

We examined this issue in the present study by pooling data from five published studies conducted in college student samples that examined the effect of distanced-analysis on emotional reactivity and thought content which also included unanalyzed Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) data. The BDI is one of the most widely used measures for detecting the intensity of depression symptoms in both normal and clinical populations (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988) and has been extensively used in prior research to examine the relationship between depressive symptoms and rumination. We used this measure in the present study to directly connect the present work to prior research on rumination, and to provide a first step towards examining the clinical generalizability of research on distanced-analysis.

Section snippets

Samples

To date, the effect of manipulating self-perspective on emotional reactivity has been examined in five samples in which BDI data were also collected (total N with BDI data = 477,2 Mage = 21.74, 53% female). Characteristics of each sample are summarized in Table 1.

Overview

All studies used the same instructions to manipulate self-perspective but differed in

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH0393499) and NRSA and NSF fellowships. We would like to thank the many research assistants who helped conduct these experiments.

References (21)

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