Article2012

“Asking why” from a distance: Its cognitive and emotional consequences for people with major depressive disorder.

Ethan F. Kross · David E. Gard · Patricia J. Deldin · Jessica Clifton · Özlem N. Ayduk

140 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Abnormal Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Identity, Memory, and Therapy Mental Health via Writing

Abstract

Although analyzing negative experiences leads to physical and mental health benefits among healthy populations, when people with depression engage in this process on their own they often ruminate and feel worse. Here we examine whether it is possible for adults with depression to analyze their feelings adaptively if they adopt a self-distanced perspective. We examined this issue by randomly assigning depressed and nondepressed adults to analyze their feelings surrounding a depressing life experience from either a self-distanced or a self-immersed perspective and then examined the implications of these manipulations for depressotypic thought accessibility, negative affect, implicit and explicit avoidance, and thought content. Four key results emerged. First, all participants were capable of self-distancing while analyzing their feelings. Second, participants who analyzed their feelings from a self-distanced perspective showed lower levels of depressotypic thought accessibility and negative affect compared to their self-immersed counterparts. Third, analyzing negative feelings from a self-distanced perspective led to an adaptive shift in the way people construed their experience--they recounted the emotionally arousing details of their experience less and reconstrued them in ways that promoted insight and closure. It did not promote avoidance. Finally, self-distancing did not influence negative affect or depressotypic thought accessibility among nondepressed participants. These findings suggest that whether depressed adults' attempts to analyze negative feelings lead to adaptive or maladaptive consequences may depend critically on whether they do so from a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 140 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1958The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.1994Measuring emotion: The self-assessment manikin and the semantic differential 2004Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition 1978Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation.2005Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes 1998Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology.2003Rumination Reconsidered: A Psychometric Analysis

Cited by

2013Emotion Differentiation as a Protective Factor Against Nonsuicidal Self-Injury in Borderline Personality Disorder 2015This too shall pass: Temporal distance and the regulation of emotional distress.2014Neural markers of positive reappraisal and their associations with trait reappraisal and worry.2015Stepping back to move forward: Expressive writing promotes self-distancing.2015Autobiographical Memory Disturbances in Depression: A Novel Therapeutic Target?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.