ABSTRACT
Reasoning may help solving problems and understanding personal experiences. Ruminative reasoning, however, is inconclusive, repetitive, and usually regards negative thoughts. We asked how reasoning as manifested in oral autobiographical narratives might differ when it is ruminative versus when it is adaptive by comparing two constructs from the fields of psychotherapy research and narrative research that are potentially beneficial: innovative moments (IMs) and autobiographical reasoning (AR). IMs captures statements in that elaborate on changes regarding an earlier personal previous problem of the narrator, and AR capture the connecting of past events with other parts of the narrator's life or enduring aspects of the narrator. A total of N = 94 university students had been selected from 492 students to differ maximally on trait rumination and trait adaptive reflection, and were grouped as ruminators (N = 38), reflectors (N = 37), and a group with little ruminative and reflective tendencies ("unconcerned," N = 19). Participants narrated three negative personal experiences (disappointing oneself, harming someone, and being rejected) and two self-related experiences of more mixed valence (turning point and lesson learnt). Reflectors used more IMs and more negative than positive autobiographical arguments (AAs), but not more overall AAs than ruminators. Group differences were not moderated by the valence of memories, and groups did not differ in the positive effect of narrating on mood. Trait depression/anxiety was predicted negatively by IMs and positively by AAs. Thus, IMs are typical for reflectors but not ruminators, whereas the construct of AR appears to capture reasoning processes irrespective of their ruminative versus adaptive uses.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Working memory (WM) impairments are a prominent neurocognitive symptom in schizophrenia (SZ) and include deficits in memory for serial order and abnormalities in serial position effects (i.e., primacy and recency effects). Former studies predominantly focused on investigating these deficits applying verbal or static visual stimuli, but little is known about WM processes that involve dynamic visual movements. We examined WM for visual motion directions, its susceptibility to distraction and the effect of serial positioning. METHOD: Twenty-three patients with paranoid SZ and 23 healthy control subjects (HC) took part in the study. We conducted an adapted Sternberg-type recognition paradigm: three random dot kinematograms (RDKs) that depicted coherent visual motion were used as stimuli and a distractor stimulus was incorporated into the task. RESULTS: SZ patients performed significantly worse in the WM visual motion task, when a distractor stimulus was presented. While HC showed a recency effect for later RDKs, the effect was absent in SZ patients. WM deficits were associated with more severe psychopathological symptoms, poor visual and verbal learning, and a longer duration of illness. Furthermore, SZ patients showed impairments in several other neurocognitive domains. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that early WM processing of visual motion is susceptible to interruption and that WM impairments are associated with clinical symptoms in SZ. The absence of a recency effect is discussed in respect of 3 theoretical approaches-impaired WM for serial order information, abnormalities in early visual representations (i.e., masking effects), and deficits in later visual processing (i.e., attentional blink effect). (PsycINFO Database Record
