The nature of worry and rumination suggests that these processes should overlap with and differ from each other. It is evident that worry and rumination can exist dynamically within the same individual. However, the study of similarities and differences between worry and rumination may offer a number of important opportunities.
First, it may allow us to construct systematically a profile of the constituents of persistent negative thinking processes that contribute to specific and/or general manifestations of psychological disturbance. In this way, an examination of the similarities and differences between worry and rumination may also assist in refining the proposed concepts. Whether the similarities or differences are key contributors to psychopathology is not yet clear.
Second, this may also facilitate the development and validation of idiosyncratic models for understanding perseverative negative thinking in anxiety and depression.
Third, knowledge of similarities and differences between worry and rumination may facilitate development of effective psychological interventions by targeting core manifestations of psychopathology.
Worry appears to be intimately related to rumination. Worry has been reported to be elevated in people with depression. That these types of cognitions were clearly distinct phenomena. The content of chains of anxious (worrisome) thoughts is likely to differ from depressive (ruminative) thoughts in that the former may be particularly characterised by themes of anticipated threat or danger in the future, while rumination may involve themes of past personal loss or failure.
Worrisome thinking has also been characterised by more statements implying catastrophic interpretations of future events than dysphoric ruminative thinking. Research shows that there are content differences between worry and rumination. More recently, theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that other dimensions of thinking, apart from the thematic content of thought, are involved in vulnerability to, and maintenance of, psychopathology.
Two components of thinking styles should be considered in this context: (1) process dimensions and (2) metacognitive dimensions. Recent empirical work has focused on exploring such process and metacognitive dimensions of worry and rumination.
Although ruminative and worrisome thinking share a number of similarities, they also differ on several dimensions. In comparison with rumination, worry was found to be significantly greater in verbal content, associated with more compulsion to act, and with more effort and confidence in problem solving. Rumination was significantly more past-oriented than worry. The only remaining significant differences after adjustments for multiple comparisons were those concerned with dimensions of effort to problem-solve and past orientation.
Relationships between dimensions of thinking and affective responses for each style of thinking were also explored. Greater depression was correlated significantly with lower confidence in problem-solving ability and greater past orientation of the ruminative thoughts. In relation to the worrisome thoughts, greater anxiety was correlated significantly with less dismissability of worry, greater distraction by worry, meta-worry, compulsion to act on worry, and more attentional focus on worries. Different components of thinking style are associated with emotional experience.
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