Danielle Akinwande

Rumination is defined as “difficult to control thoughts” that negatively affect an individual’s psyche (Hallion et al., 2019).  Frequently, rumination can be self-focused and has ties to past events and situations (Lewis et al., 2019).  In the current study, we examined participant’s writing samples for indications of rumination. These data were a part of another project that involved a writing prompt. The prompt gave participants 5 minutes to write down tasks that needed to be completed in the near future.  We used these samples to search for rumination in individuals writing samples. Writing samples were analyzed in Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). We used this software to analyze three elements: first-person pronoun use, past-focused terms, and negative emotion terms.

Participants were divided into two groups based on scoring in the Rumination Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ; Trapnell & Campbell, 2015). Writing samples of high ruminators (n=33) were compared to those of low ruminators (n=29).  We hypothesized that the high ruminator group would show higher rates of personal pronoun use, past-focused terms, and negative emotion. We conducted a series of T-tests and found no significant differences between groups within these elements. These elements did not often occur in the writing samples perhaps due to the fact that the writing instructions encouraged broad descriptions of upcoming events rather than emotional expression. In the future, we plan to have a different prompt that encourages participants to express their emotions so that writing would be more likely to reflect the elements in rumination.