Rumination & Depression.pdf

Rumination, a pattern of recursive thinking focused on one's negative mood, is a vulnerability factor in the development and maintenance of depressive episodes, prolonging and deepening depression by perpetuating depressed mood and increasing the risk of subsequent episodes, and is associated with biases in emotional material processing. Depressed individuals exhibit increased attention to negative information and better memory for negative stimuli, with recent studies reporting increased amygdala responding when attending to and remembering negative emotional material. A study using fMRI examined neural aspects of rumination in depressed and healthy control individuals, finding that depressed participants exhibited increased activation in the orbitofrontal cortex, subgenual anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during rumination versus concrete distraction, and greater neural activity during rumination versus abstract distraction in the amygdala, rostral anterior cingulate/medial prefrontal cortex, and other regions. These findings indicate that ruminative self-focus is associated with enhanced recruitment of limbic and medial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions in depression.