summary: A new study reveals that adolescent girls who ruminate exhibit unique brain activity patterns when faced with social rejection. The study used fMRI scans to demonstrate increased activity in brain regions associated with self-concept and emotional states in girls who are prone to rumination.
This research suggests that rumination deeply embeds negative feedback into one's self-concept. These findings could guide targeted interventions to help girls reframe negative experiences and reduce long-term mental health consequences.
Important facts:
- As seen in fMRI scans, adolescent girls who ruminate have been shown to have increased brain activity in self-concept areas during social rejection.
- The study involved 116 girls aged 16 to 19 and used a unique approach to measure the brain's response to rejection.
- This study highlights the importance of addressing adolescent rumination to prevent long-term mental health problems.
sauce: University of California, Davis
Everyone ruminates about bad things that happened to them. Whether it's a messy breakup, an embarrassing mistake, or just someone being mean, it's hard not to think about what happened and why. there is. For people who ruminate too much, this negative thought pattern can cause lasting problems with their mental health.
A research team led by the University of California, Davis Mind and Brain Center found that adolescent girls who tend to ruminate more often show different patterns of brain activity when faced with social rejection.
The study was published in the journal December Developmental cognitive neuroscience.
“Everyone experiences rejection, but not everyone experiences it in the same way,” says Amanda Guyer, associate director of the Mind and Brain Center and professor of human ecology at the University of California, Davis. says. She said: “By identifying what brain processes drive differences in rumination tendencies, we can offer people better ways to avoid long-term harm.”
Experiencing rejection during a brain scan
Experiencing social rejection directly leaves a distinct fingerprint in the brain that can be measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This type of scan can find subtle changes in blood flow and electrical activity in different parts of the brain. An fMRI scan shows many things a person feels and thinks in real time.
In this study, 116 girls between the ages of 16 and 19 participated in two tasks to measure how their brains respond to social rejection. During the first visit, participants were shown photos of 60 teenagers their age and asked to choose 30 with whom they would like to chat.
On the second visit, participants were placed in an fMRI scanner and told which of the teens in the photo they wanted to chat with and which ones they didn't. While in the fMRI scanner, the girls were also asked about these reactions, as well as how they felt being rejected by their chosen one during their first visit. Data was collected from his 2012 to his 2014 and analyzed in his 2023, when researchers applied new testing methods.
How negative emotions encode self-image
fMRI showed that rejection increases activity in parts of the brain known to play a role in how we define who we are.
These parts of the brain become active with increased blood flow and electrical activity when we think about ourselves and our emotional states, or when we retrieve memories.
Being told that a coworker doesn't want to chat is a form of social rejection, and this rejection showed up in all the girls' brain scans to varying degrees. However, the girl who self-reported that she was prone to rumination was the most active in her brain scan.
“Our findings suggest that girls who tend to ruminate are experiencing more than just temporary sadness after being rejected,” Geyer said. “They ingrain this negative feedback deeply into their self-concept.”
change the subject to stop rumination
These findings suggest that unique brain processes are activated after rejection in girls with strong rumination tendencies. This knowledge allows for targeted interventions that can treat rumination and prevent it from causing bigger problems later on, Geyer said.
“Our study suggests that reframing their negative experiences in a way that makes them feel better rather than worse afterwards can make a difference.” said Geyer.
Guyer is joined as an author by Leehyun Yoon, also of the University of California, Davis. Kate Keenan of the University of Chicago and Alison E. Hipwell and Erica E. Forbes of the University of Pittsburgh.
Funding: This research was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
About this rumination/social behavior research news
author: Karen Nikos
sauce: University of California, Davis
contact: Karen Nikos – University of California, Davis
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Obsessed with a thought: Associations between rumination and neural responses to social rejection in adolescent girls.Written by Amanda Geyer et al. Developmental cognitive neuroscience
abstract
Obsessed with a thought: Associations between rumination and neural responses to social rejection in adolescent girls.
Rumination is a significant risk factor for psychopathology in adolescent girls and is associated with heightened and prolonged physiological arousal following social rejection.
However, no studies have examined how rumination is related to adolescent girls' neural responses to social rejection. Therefore, the current study aims to address this gap.
Adolescent girls (N = 116; ages 16.95 to 19.09 years) completed a social appraisal fMRI task in which they self-reported their rumination tendencies and received hypothetical feedback (acceptance, rejection) from peers they liked or disliked. did.
Rejection-related neural activity and connectivity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) were regressed during rumination, controlling for rejection sensitivity and depressive symptoms.
Rumination is associated with distinctive neural responses following rejection from a favored peer, including increased neural activity in the precuneus, inferior parietal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area (SMA); The prefrontal cortex contained decreased sgACC connectivity with multiple regions including the prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and ventrolateral regions.
Greater activity in the precuneus and SMA mediated the effect of rumination on slower reaction times to report emotional states after being rejected by a preferred peer. These findings provide clues about unique cognitive processes (e.g., mentalization, conflict processing, memory encoding) following rejection in girls with high levels of rumination.
