Rumination, goals and autobiographical memory

Study 1 used a two-stage design in which participants (N = 210) were initially convenience-sampled from the undergraduate population of the University of Exeter. In the first stage (Study 1a), participants completed an idiographic-nomothetic assessment of goal motivation. This involved participants generating ten goal strivings, before rating each on various measures of efficacy, value, internalised motivation and conflict. Participants then completed self-report questionnaire measures of trait rumination and recent depressive symptoms. Personal goal strivings were later coded by the experimenter for approach/avoidance and abstraction/concreteness. Inter-rater reliability of these coding schemes was checked with an independent judge and found to be adequate. In the second stage (Study 1b), approximately one month later, 194 participants returned to the laboratory. Using an autobiographical memory retrieval fluency paradigm, they were individually asked to retrieve and note down as many specific autobiographical memories relating to each of their personal goal strivings as they could in three minutes. They then rated each memory for age, rehearsal, importance, emotionality, and the extent to which they viewed it as a success or a failure with respect to the original striving. Finally, after completing some filler tasks, participants rated the extent to which they had ruminated about each goal striving over the last month, and the extent to which they made progress on each goal striving. Study 2 used experience-sampling methodology (ESM) to investigate fluctuations in ruminative thought and affect and their association with personal goal striving progress during everyday life. Participants (N = 109) were convenience-sampled from the undergraduate population of the University of Exeter. At an initial briefing, participants completed self-report questionnaire measures of trait rumination and recent depressive symptoms, before the experience-sampling procedure was explained with reference to the PRO-Diary wrist-worn unit (electronic diary). Participants then nominated one agentic goal striving and one communal goal striving that they would monitor during the experience-sampling phase. Eight times daily over the subsequent two-week experience-sampling period, while going about their everyday activities, the PRO-Diary cued participants to answer multiple questions about their thinking style, affect and social context using self-report scales that were administered via the PRO-Diary. In parallel assessments that occurred thrice daily during the experience-sampling period, the PRO-Diary cued participants to record how much progress they were making on each of their previously nominated goal strivings and the amount of progress they expected to make before the next assessment. Finally, participants returned to the laboratory to return the PRO-Diary, complete a final measure of depressive symptoms and be debriefed.

The Data Collection is available for download to users registered with the UK Data Service.