Exploring ethnicity's role in the level of cognitive processing adopted during depressive rumination

Depressive rumination among European Americans (EA) is a harmful style of responding to depressed mood because it is associated with a myriad of negative consequences, including the onset of depression. Recent work suggests that depressive rumination may pose less psychological harm among Asians compared to EA, but the reasons for this are not clear. The current study experimentally tested the hypothesis that depressive rumination differences between EA and Asians are a result of them having different depressive rumination thinking styles. EA and Asian Americans (AA) depressively ruminated about a self-identified unresolved problem and then provided self-descriptions to examine their self-concept. The self-descriptions were coded for whether adjectives (conceptually abstract) or verbs (conceptually concrete) were used to describe the self. There was some evidence that EA used more adjectives than AA in addition to AA using more verbs than EA to describe themselves. These findings suggested that compared to EA, AA may have a more concrete (“constructive”) depressive rumination thinking style. Implications of these findings in the context of theory and past research are discussed.