Rumination and Emotional Modulation of the Attentional Blink

Rumination about negative experiences is widely viewed as a transdiagnostic process underlying various forms of psychopathology that involve emotion dysregulation. Cognitive models highlight the role of attentional control and emotional biases in the development and maintenance of rumination. We suggest that the temporality of the attentional blink paradigm may make it especially relevant for studying rumination-related biases and designing bias modification interventions for rumination. In this paper, we examine the association between brooding, a maladaptive form of rumination, and emotional biases in the attentional blink paradigm. We show that brooding is associated with biased disengagement from positive stimuli. Our findings support the Attentional Scope Model of rumination (Whitmer and Gotlib, Psychol Bull 139:1036, 2013) in suggesting that rumination is associated with a narrow temporal attentional scope.