Title: Some Good News About Rumination: Task-Focused Thinking After Failure Facilitates Performance Improvement
Abstract: Is there an adaptive side to rumination? We tested whether rumination that is focused on correcting past mistakes and active goal achievement could produce positive outcomes; this is in contrast to rumination that focuses on the implications of failure (i.e., state rumination) and task-irrelevant rumination. In all studies, participants received failure feedback on an initial task. A second task similar to the first provided an opportunity for improvement. Studies 1 and 2 manipulated type of ruminative thought such that it was action-focused, state-focused, or task-irrelevant. Action-focused rumination led to performance improvement relative to the other two conditions. Experiment 3 allowed participants to ruminate naturalistically. The more that participants' rumination contained action-focused thoughts, the more their performance improved. Hence, rumination can yield benefits if it focuses on correcting errors and goal attainment.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 53
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