Rumination, Worry, Cognitive Avoidance, and Behavioral Avoidance: Examination of Temporal Effects
Highlights
► Temporal relations among daily rumination, avoidance, and sad mood were tested. ► Adolescents (n = 78) completed electronic questionnaires for seven days. ► Cognitive avoidance predicted later rumination and worry. ► Rumination and worry mediated the effects of cognitive avoidance on sadness and anxiety.
Section snippets
The Present Study
This study aimed to examine the causal relationship among daily reported rumination, avoidance, and affect in a sample of community adolescents. We made the following hypotheses: First, daily levels of rumination will predict subsequent increases in levels of daily sadness. Second, cognitive and behavioral avoidance will predict increases in daily rumination given the positive association demonstrated previously (see Moulds et al., 2007). Third, rumination will mediate the temporal association
Participants and procedure
One hundred and one adolescents ages 14–18 (mean age = 16.73, SD = 1.33) participated in the study. The adolescents were 60.7% female. The adolescents were 92.3% Caucasian, 2.6% biracial, 3.8% Native American, and 1.3% other. Participants were recruited in their high school and invited to participate in a study about thoughts, feelings, and stressors that adolescents typically encounter on a daily basis. For those interested in participating, consent was obtained from parents and assent from the
Results
We first fit an initial model with sadness as the dependent variable and sadness assessed the previous day in order to examine the proportion of variance in changes in sadness that reflects between- and within-subjects variation. This model regressed the dependent variable, sadness (at time t) on an intercept, sadness at time t-1, a within-subjects (Level 1) residual, and a between-subjects (Level 2) residual (see Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002, p. 100). Results indicated that approximately 72% of the
Discussion
The goal of this investigation was to examine the temporal relations among daily rumination, worry, and avoidance, as well as sad and anxious affect in a sample of adolescents. Our analyses revealed an interesting chain of influence among these constructs. Daily cognitive avoidance was predictive of both increases in subsequent rumination and anxiety. In contrast, behavioral avoidance was predictive of later anxiety, but not sadness. Further, both rumination and worry were predicted by earlier
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