Abstract
Co-rumination, or perseverating about problems aloud with another individual, is an emotion regulation strategy enacted within relationships. Despite its association with depressive symptoms, co-rumination may benefit friendships. For example, the independent emotion regulation tendencies of each individual in the dyad may interact with co-rumination to exacerbate or protect against its negative effects on depressive experiences. This interaction might be particularly important during the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood when friendships are in flux and emotion regulation capacity is increasing. Therefore, the current study assessed whether emerging adult friends’ tendencies to enact rumination and reappraisal moderated the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms. Path analyses revealed that the extent to which a co-ruminating individuals experienced depressive symptoms depended on the extent to which their friend reappraised: a positive, linear association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms emerged only for target participants whose friend was low in reappraisal use.
Moderators of the Association Between Co-Rumination and Depressive Symptoms in Emerging Adult Friendships
Emotion regulation is a set of psychological processes involved in the up- and down-regulation of emotional experiences (Aldao, 2013; Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003; Gross, 2014). For example, rumination is an individual emotion regulation strategy whereby individuals perseverate on negative emotions and perceive problems as worse than they are and unsolvable (Rose et al., 2017). It is consistently and strongly positively associated with depressive symptoms (Piraman et al., 2016). Conversely, cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting distressing situations to change their emotional impacts (Sachs-Ericsson et al., 2021) and is negatively correlated with depressive symptoms (Aldao, 2013).
When shared between close individuals, the up- and down-regulation of emotions creates a sense of co-regulation (Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003). Co-rumination is a co-regulation process that occurs when two people ruminate together (Rose, 2002). The association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms is less consistent than it is for individual rumination and depressive symptoms. Because co-rumination is a relational process that involves more than one person regulating their own and their partner’s emotions, differences in friends’ habitual use of a broader range of strategies may account for discrepancies in patterns of association between co-rumination and individual depressive symptoms. However, scant attention has been paid to the influence of friend factors, such as the tendency for friends to ruminate or reappraise their emotional experiences, on the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms. To address this gap in the literature, the current study assessed whether the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms is moderated by friend emotion regulation strategy use. We assessed these effects in a sample of emerging adult friendship pairs because change in social relationships, emotion regulation habits, and risk for mental health problems characterize this pivotal period of the life course, linking late adolescence and adulthood.
Developmental systems theory (Lerner, 1998) and its extensions to psychopathology (Sroufe, 1997) hold that individual developmental outcomes, including during the emerging adulthood period of the life course (see Schulenberg et al., 2004), result from transactional processes between individuals and their environments. Starting in infancy, emotions are regulated through transactional processes between children and caregivers (Deater-Deckard et al., 2016). Across childhood and adolescence, transactional processes elaborate into and shape emotion regulation capacity. For example, early experience shapes one’s coping behaviors, cognitions, and dispositions that filter and direct emotional experience (Gross, 2014). In their developmental account, Diamond and Aspinwall (2003) view instances of emotion regulation at particular points in time as discrete expressions of a broader capacity to flexibly activate, coordinate, and direct emotional states within and across developmental periods. From this view, emotion regulation capacity is considered an integral component of the self-regulatory processes that direct development more generally across the entire life course (Carver & Scheier, 1990; Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003; Heckhausen et al., 2010).
Although shaped by earlier experience, emotion regulation capacity continues to develop across the transition to adulthood and the transition from adolescence to adulthood is a period of growth in individual emotion regulation habits (Riediger & Klipker, 2014; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). In turn, this period is characterized by variability in emotional experience, with emotional well-being maturing on average (e.g., Galambos et al., 2006; Ross & Mirowsky, 2008; Schulenberg & Zarrett, 2006). At the same time, prevalence rates of mental health problems that involve the regulation of emotions, such as depression, peak during emerging adulthood relative to earlier in adolescence (Rohde et al., 2013) and to later points in the adult life course (Pearson et al., 2013). Co-rumination with friends during this period may play an important role in predicting heterogeneity in emotional experience.
Compared to later in adulthood, emerging adult social networks tend to be larger than those in later periods of the adult life course (Antonucci et al., 2010). As individuals navigate their way through these networks, they may establish new friendships that are more or less beneficial to their mental health and well-being. Friends are the most preferred confidants during the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood and fulfill all aspects of social support, including emotional support (Carbery & Buhrmester, 1998). However, interpersonal difficulties, such as not being sure how to support friends struggling with their mental health or receiving unsolicited advice perceived as critical or condescending, are frequent during the emerging adulthood period (Kirmayer et al., 2021). In addition, Bagwell et al. (2005) found that higher levels of negative friendship interaction features, such as frequent conflict and antagonism, were associated with clinical symptomatology. Others have similarly found that friendship instability during this period predicts depressive symptoms (Lapierre & Poulin, 2020). These results suggest that friendships are important contributors to emerging adults’ mental health. It is surprising then that little research has examined co-rumination in the context of emerging adult friendships.
With respect to friendship quality in adolescence, Rose et al. (2017) found prospective associations between co-rumination and friendship quality, in which higher friendship quality exacerbated risk for depressive symptoms by further increasing co-rumination, suggesting a reinforcing effect of friendship quality. However, using moderation analyses, Guassi Moreira and colleagues (2016) found that high levels of co-rumination were only associated with depressive symptoms among first year college students who reported being in low-quality relationships, suggesting a protective effect of higher friendship quality.
The disparate findings on the functional role of friendship quality on the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms may be explained by friends’ individual emotional habits. Individual emotion regulation capacity increases and social networks expand in emerging adulthood. Thus, whether co-rumination results in an increase in depressive symptoms may depend not only on the quality of the friendship in which co-rumination occurs (Rose & Rudolph, 2006), but qualities of the friends themselves. That is, it may not be friendship quality that determines whether co-rumination is adaptive or harmful, but the emotion regulation habits of the friend with whom an individual is co-ruminating with. For example, Afifi et al. (2013) found that when young adults co-ruminated with a friend who responded in an unsupportive manner, anxiety increased. In contrast, supportive remarks prevented the up-regulation of anxiety. Similarly, the types of emotion regulation strategies that a friend tends to employ on their own may augment the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms for their peer.
Cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulating strategy involving reframing emotions in a more positive light, is negatively correlated with psychopathology (Aldao, 2013; Aldao et al., 2010; Cludius et al., 2020) and positively correlated with psychological well-being (Gross & John, 2003). Reappraisal often results in the desired changes in self-reported emotion (Gross, 1998; Jackson et al., 2000), peripheral physiology (Denson et al., 2011; Dillon & LaBar, 2005; Ray et al., 2010), and neural measures of emotion (Chang et al., 2015; Dörfel et al., 2014; Hajcak & Nieuwenhuis, 2006; Kalisch et al., 2005; Lohani & Isaacowitz, 2014; Ochsner et al., 2002; Schaefer et al., 2002; Shahane et al., 2019). These findings gave rise to our first hypothesis: co-ruminating with a friend who relies heavily on reappraisal to manage their experiences of negative emotions and encourage problem-solving may protect oneself from depressive symptoms.
Conversely, meta-analyses on rumination, a form of perseverative cognition that focuses on negative content, have established that rumination has a large positive correlation with symptoms of psychopathology, with an especially large effect on depressive symptoms (Aldao et al., 2010; Compas et al., 2017). Rumination is also more strongly related to overall psychopathology than other maladaptive strategies, such as avoidance and suppression (Aldao et al., 2010). Further, rumination is negatively related to problem solving (Hong, 2007). In light of these findings, we present a second hypothesis: co-ruminating with friends who ruminate on their own may increase one’s likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms. Individuals who rely heavily on rumination to manage their emotions may drive the co-rumination process by encouraging their friend to dwell on problems and focus on the negative, while failing to find solutions. In turn, this might perpetuate the cycle of co-rumination and lead their co-ruminating peers to be especially vulnerable to depressive symptoms.
Same-gender friendships are specifically important for emerging adults (see Barry et al., 2016). They are more common than heterosocial friendships (Mehta & Strough, 2009) and many emerging adults report a preference for their same-gender friendships (Baumgarte & Nelson, 2009). Emerging adults are also more likely to self-disclose to same-sex friends than parents or romantic partners (Derlega et al., 2011). Hence, gender may also act as a moderator in the link between co-rumination and mental health outcomes in emerging adults. Indeed, Rose et al. (2007) found that co-rumination predicted depressive symptoms in girls, over a 6-month follow-up period, but not in boys. Similarly, Bastin et al. (2018) found that co-brooding, a passive component of co-rumination characterized by the tendency to dwell on negative feelings within a dyadic relationship, predicted high levels of concurrent and future depressive symptoms in girls. In contrast, boys who engaged in co-brooding were more likely to report fewer depressive symptoms. However, other studies have not found gender differences. Cross-sectional studies with teenagers (Hankin et al., 2010; Rose, 2002) and a prospective study with a college sample (Calmes & Roberts, 2008) discovered that the relation between co-rumination and depressive symptoms does not vary as a function of gender, suggesting that co-rumination remains maladaptive for boys, the same way that it does for girls (Stone & Gibb, 2015). Therefore, it remains unclear whether the effects of co-rumination operate the same way in same-sex female dyads as it does in same-sex male dyads or mixed dyads. The examination of individual emotion regulation tendencies may help to clarify these disparate findings.
The Present Study
The current study aimed to assess the potential moderating effects of emerging adult friendship quality, friend rumination, and friend cognitive reappraisal use on the association between dyad-level co-rumination and individual depressive symptoms. We tested our hypotheses in a sample of emerging adults enrolled in university, a key developmental context for a large proportion of the population of young adults (Kirmayer et al., 2021). Following developmental theory, in particular with respect to the emerging adulthood period of the life course, we expected individuals, and therefore dyads, to vary in ratings of friendship quality, co-rumination, individual emotion regulation habits, and depressive symptoms (Schulenberg et al., 2004). We used path analyses to separate and simultaneously test dyad-level and individual-level effects.
We proposed two novel hypotheses. We expected that the association between emerging adults’ reports of co-rumination with a chosen friend and their own depressive symptoms would be 1) lower in magnitude when their friend’s use of cognitive reappraisal was higher (Hypothesis 1); and 2) higher in magnitude when their friend’s use of rumination was higher (Hypothesis 2). Following from previous results with emerging adults, we also hypothesized a protective effect of friendship quality, such that the association between emerging adults’ reports of co-rumination with a chosen friend and their own depressive symptoms would be lower when friendship quality was higher (Hypothesis 3). These associations were examined in both female-female and female-male friend pairs.
Method
Participants and Procedures
One hundred and 11 friendship pairs (222 participants) from a large Canadian university in an urban center participated in this study. Female participants constituted 80% of the sample and male participants constituted 20% of the sample. The age range of participants was 18–25 years old. Participants were recruited across degree programs and years of study through the Psychology Participant Pool and flyers posted on campuses. Participants received course credit or a $10 gift card. Target participants were asked to bring a friend to the laboratory. A research assistant ensured that participants clearly understood the procedure of the study and asked them, separately and privately, to confirm their consent to participate in the study. Next, target participants and friends separately and privately completed surveys on laptop computers. The study was approved by the internal research ethics review board at the university where the study was conducted. Of the participants who were originally recruited (mean age = 20.89, SD = 1.57), 77% self-identified as White, 15% as Asian, 4% as Black, and 4% as another ethnic identity. Of the friends who were brought to the laboratory by the target participants (mean age = 21.07, SD = 1.58), 74% self-identified as White, 17% as Asian, 7% as Black, 2% as another ethnic identity.
Measures
Friendship Characteristic Screening Questions.
Participants were asked the year in which they first met their friend, and whether they were currently, or if they were ever, in a romantic relationship with that friend, how long they had been friends, how close they were, how well they felt they knew their friend, and how often across a week they interacted.
Depressive Symptoms.
We used the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depressions Scale (CES-D; Radloff, 1977) to measure depressive symptoms. This scale uses items related to mood, which were selected from well-known validated depression scales (e.g., Beck et al., 1961; Raskin et al., 1969; Zung, 1965). Participants rated how often they felt or behaved in various ways in the past week on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from “Rarely (less than 1 day per week)” to “Most of the time (5–7 days)”. Sample items include “I was bothered by things that didn’t usually bother me” and “I did not feel like eating; my appetite was poor”. The scale was shown to have high internal consistency (α=.85 to α=.90: Santor et al., 2006; Wei et al., 2010). These results were consistent with the reliability coefficient of .92 calculated in the current sample. In the current study, mean scores were computed across items with higher scores indicating greater symptom levels.
Co-rumination.
A version of the Co-Rumination Questionnaire (Rose, 2002) was used in the current study to measure the amount of co-rumination in the friendship dyad. Participants rated their degree of agreement with each statement, on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Not at all true” to “Really true”. Items included “We talk about problems that my friend or I are having almost every time we see each other” and “When we see each other, if one of us has a problem, we will talk about the problem even if we had planned to do something else together”. The reliability coefficient calculated in the current sample was .89, consistent with the strong internal alpha of .96 reported in Rose’s (2002) study. In the current study, a mean score was computed with higher scores indicating greater co-rumination.
Friendship Quality.
As a measure of friendship quality, participants were asked to rate their affection for their friend and satisfaction with the friendship using the McGill Friendship Questionnaire-Respondent’s Affection (MFQ-RA; Mendelson & Aboud, 1999). They indicated their degree of agreement with 16 items on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from “Very much disagree” to “Very much agree”. For example, items included “want to stay friends for a long time” and “happy with my friendship with ___”. The reliability coefficient calculated in the current study was 0.96, which was consistent with the Cronbach alphas ranging from .92 to .96 found in Mendelson and Aboud’s study. For the current study, a mean score was computed with higher scores indicating greater friendship quality and was included as a covariate in the analytic models.
Friend Emotion Regulation Measures
Cognitive Reappraisal.
The cognitive reappraisal subscale of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) was used in the current study (e.g., “I control my emotions by changing the way I think about the situation I am in”) to assess how participants regulate their emotions. Participants indicated how much they agreed with each statement using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”. In the current study, a reliability coefficient of .89 was found for the cognitive reappraisal subscale, which is consistent with the average coefficient of .79 found in Gross and John’s (2003) study. In the current study, a mean score was computed with higher scores indicating greater cognitive reappraisal.
Rumination.
The brooding subscale of the 10-item short version of the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS; Treynor et al., 2003) was used to measure rumination. Participants rated their degree of agreement on items such as “Think about a recent situation, wishing it had gone better” and “Analyze recent events to try to understand why you are depressed” on a 4-point scale ranging from “Almost never” to “Almost always”. The current study found a reliability coefficient of .74 for the brooding subscale, which is consistent with the coefficient .77 found in Treynor and colleagues’ (2003) study. This short version of the RRS is considered reliable and similar to other well-known methods and remains nonredundant with depression scale items. In the current sample, mean scores across items were calculated with higher scores indicating greater rumination.
Results
Prior to data analysis, data were screened to ensure that all dyads consisted of actual friendship pairs. Dyads were removed if either the target participant or the friend selected the lowest possible option on the screening questions about how well they knew each other and how close they were. Based on this screening, eight pairs were removed. Another pair was also removed as one friend did not provide data on these questions. 15 additional pairs were excluded because at least one of the friendship members reported either being currently or previously in a romantic relationship with their friend, resulting in 87 friend pairs (174 participants).
Intercorrelations, Means, Standard Deviations, and Friend Pair Gender Differences.
Note. *p< .05, **p < .01.
To assess the moderating influence of a friend’s tendencies to use reappraisal and rumination on the association between target participants’ co-rumination and their own depressive symptoms, we ran a series of structural equation models in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2018). In our first model, we assessed whether the association between the target participants’ report of co-rumination with their friend and their own depressive symptoms was moderated by their friends’ tendencies to use reappraisal or rumination. Depressive symptom scores were regressed onto target participant co-rumination, friend reappraisal, friend rumination, and the two interaction terms: target participant co-rumination and friend reappraisal and target participant co-rumination and friend rumination. The model fit the data well: RMSEA= .00, CFI= 1.00, SRMR= .00. In line with our first hypothesis, target participant depressive symptoms were associated with their reports of co-rumination with the friend they chose for the study (B= 1.40, p= .04), friend’s use of reappraisal (B= 0.85, p= .02), and the interaction between these two variables (B= −1.18, p= .01). Figure 1 shows a visualization of this interaction. However, contrary to our second hypothesis, target participant depressive symptoms were not associated with friend rumination (B= 0.47, p= .31) nor the interaction between target participant co-rumination and friend rumination (B= −0.59, p= .37). See Table 2 for all study results. Visualization of the interaction between co-rumination and friend’s reappraisal use when predicting depressive symptoms. Lines represent one standard deviation above the mean, the mean, and one standard deviation below the mean of friend reappraisal use. Reappraisal and Rumination Moderation On The Association Between Co-Rumination And Depressive Symptoms. Note. *p < .05 B = standardized coefficient.
This model was then run separately for the female-female and female-male friend pairs to assess whether this effect was maintained across gender make-up of friendships. For the female-female pairs, the effects were slightly amplified: target friend co-rumination (B= 1.91, p= .02), friend reappraisal (B= 1.05, p= .03), and the interaction between these two variables (B= −1.46, p= .02) were associated with depressive symptoms. However, in the female-male pairs, no paths were significant.
Reappraisal, rumination, and friendship quality moderation on the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms.
Note. *p < .05 B = standardized coefficient.
Discussion
The current study aimed to address the inconsistent empirical findings with respect to the role of friendship quality for co-rumination and depressive symptoms. Guided by a transactional relational model derived from developmental systems (Lerner, 1998), psychopathology theories (Sroufe, 1997), and their extension to the emerging adulthood period of the life course (Schulenberg et al., 2004), we examined the potential moderating effects of friend cognitive reappraisal and rumination on the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms within emerging adult friendships. We expected that high levels of friend cognitive reappraisal use would buffer the link between co-rumination and depressive symptoms (Hypothesis 1). Our findings supported this hypothesis. We also hypothesized that high levels of friend rumination use would exacerbate the relation between co-rumination and depressive symptoms (Hypothesis 2). We did not find support for this hypothesis. Overall, results demonstrated that the extent to which a co-ruminating individual experienced depressive symptoms depended on the extent to which their friend relied on reappraisal, not rumination, to manage their emotional experiences. Contrary to past research suggesting that the presence of a maladaptive emotion-regulation strategy (e.g., rumination) is more deleterious than the absence of an adaptive emotion-regulation strategy (e.g., reappraisal), results from the current study indicates a stronger association between reappraisal (vs. rumination) and depressive symptoms.
In light of previous findings showing a direct link between co-rumination and depressive symptoms (e.g., Rose, 2002; Piraman et al., 2016), results from the current study show that friend reappraisal and co-rumination interacted to predict depressive symptoms. This result supported our first hypothesis: emerging adults who co-ruminate with friends who regularly use cognitive reappraisal to manage their emotions are protected from depressive symptoms, perhaps because of their friends’ problem-solving habits. This finding indicates a more complex relation between co-rumination and depressive symptom that fits with the developmental psychopathology model (Cicchetti, 2006; Lerner, 1998; Schulenberg et al., 2004; Sroufe, 1997). This theory holds that individual developmental outcomes result from transactional processes between individuals and their environments. In line with this perspective, the results from our study suggest that within a relational context, individual depressive symptoms depend upon emotion regulation habits of the members involved in the co-ruminative discussion. Furthermore, developmental models of emotion regulation consider emotion regulation capacity as an integral component of the self-regulatory processes that direct development more generally across the lifespan (Carver & Scheier, 1990; Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003; Heckhausen et al., 2010). Our findings suggest that friendships are an important context within which this capacity is shaped during the emerging adulthood period
Past research also supports our finding about the nature of the interaction between co-rumination and cognitive reappraisal in predicting depressive symptoms. In particular, we found that reappraisal plays a role in attenuating depressive symptoms. In line with this result, McRae and Gross’ (2020) review presents compelling evidence for the positive impacts of cognitive reappraisal on well-being and mental health. Additionally, Sachs-Ericsson et al. (2021) found that cognitive reappraisal can also act as a protective factor in the relation between lower social support and depressive symptoms.
Given that rumination has long been associated with psychopathology (Aldao et al., 2010; Compas et al., 2017), our second hypothesis stated that friend rumination would amplify the association between co-rumination and depressive symptoms. This hypothesis was not supported. Results showed that the link between dyad-level co-rumination and target friend depressive symptoms did not depend on the extent to which their friend ruminated. Thus, friend individual rumination may not exacerbate the link between emerging adults’ co-rumination and depressive symptom levels. That is, the negative consequences of co-ruminating might not necessarily be made worse when done with friends who regularly ruminate on their own, given the already negative nature of co-rumination. This finding also suggests that it is the relational aspect of co-rumination, or the act of ruminating together, that may be particularly important for depressive symptoms in emerging adult friendships.
Another finding from the current study emphasizes the role of relational aspects of emerging adult friendships for depressive symptoms. Our results showed that the correlations between friendship quality and friend’s reappraisal, as well as the correlation between co-rumination and friend’s reappraisal, were significant and negative. These results suggest that emerging adults are more likely to perceive their friendship quality as lower and co-ruminate less when their friend relies heavily on reappraisal to manage their own emotions. One possibility is that emerging adults who habitually reappraise their negative emotions discourage the use of co-rumination with their friends, a co-regulation experience that tends to make friends feel connected to one another. Indeed, the association between co-rumination and friendship quality was significant and positive, supporting that this coping style increases feelings of social connectedness among college students (Weaver & Bosson, 2011) and adults (Keshishian et al., 2016). Conversely, findings from adolescence samples have shown that higher rates of co-rumination are associated with negative friendship quality (McLaughlin & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2012), a decreased number of friends over time (Starr & Davila, 2009), less social acceptance (Tompkins et al., 2011) and more interpersonal stress (Rose et al., 2017). More longitudinal or cohort studies are needed to investigate whether co-rumination differently affects the friendship quality of adolescents when compared to emerging adults.
Lastly, the present study revealed some interesting gender patterns. When models were run separately for female-female and female-male dyads, the pattern of results was quite different. The interaction between co-rumination and reappraisal remained significant for female-female pairs, but no paths were significant for female-male pairs. This result may suggest that the impacts that co-rumination and friend reappraisal have on emerging adults’ mental health is more important for young women. Another possible explanation is that women experience higher levels of depressive symptoms because they are more likely to co-ruminate than men. In fact, co-rumination is enacted primarily among female dyads (Calmes & Roberts, 2008; Hankin et al., 2010; Rose, 2002; Rose et al., 2007; Tompkins et al., 2011; Waller & Rose, 2013; White & Shih, 2012), perhaps because of the way that young women learn about communicating. Whereas females are often encouraged to talk about their emotions, the opposite is true for males. For example, boys sometimes tease each other if one discloses information about their feelings, which discourages them from talking about emotions (Miller-Slough & Dunsmore, 2016). Therefore, future research is needed to further investigate whether the impact of co-rumination differs across same-gender and mixed-gender friendships.
Limitations and Strengths
The results from the current study should take its limitations into account. First, the co-rumination questionnaire administered was a shorter version of the standard Rose (2002) measure. Nevertheless, the reliability coefficient calculated in the current sample was high and consistent with that reported in Rose’s study. Second, this was a cross-sectional study. As previously mentioned, more longitudinal work on emerging adult friendships is needed to improve understanding of how friendship processes, including co-rumination, develop in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. These studies should be conducted with samples outside the university context as well to improve generalizability. Finally, the sole use of self-reporting measures may have biased the results of our study as responses were not objectively verified.
Despite its limitations, the current study represents a novel contribution to the existing literature on the co-rumination phenomenon, particularly in emerging adulthood, because it assessed friend emotion regulation strategies as potential moderators in its relation with depressive symptoms. One particular strength of the current study is that it separated relationship perceptions reported by the target participants from the friend’s own report of emotion regulation tendencies, cognitive reappraisal, and rumination. In doing so, this research has deepened our understanding of the complex interplay between relational and individual factors that strengthen versus weaken the effects of co-rumination on depressive experiences.
Future Directions and Clinical Implications
Future research may help to clarify the mixed pattern of findings on the association between depressive experiences and co-rumination by examining other relational contextual factors that can influence this link. For example, Hruska et al. (2017) suggested that co-rumination is mostly harmful when one is focused on their own personal problems as it is more stressful than being focused on their friend’s problems. In line with this idea, Nolen-Hoeksema and Morrow (1991) showed that the influence of rumination on negative affectivity is only significant in a context where high stress is present, which provided evidence for a diathesis-stress model interpretation of rumination. Similarly, McLaughlin and Nolen-Hoeksema (2012) showed that the generation of interpersonal stress represents a pathway linking rumination to these interpersonal problems. They believe that stress could also moderate the association between co-rumination and psychopathological symptoms. Indeed, Hruska et al. (2017) found that co-rumination only predicts negative emotions when stress is present. In the absence of a stressor, individuals who co-ruminate might only benefit from heightened friendship quality and closeness. This link is not yet clear, however, as results from another study showed that daily co-rumination with a close friend predicts within-day increases in levels of negative mood in college students, even when controlling for stress (White & Shih, 2012).
Observational studies would also be an important step for future research as they offer a more objective measurement of co-rumination. For example, Rose et al. (2014) asked friendship dyads to “list a problem you have” and to discuss it in an observation room. The interaction was filmed and later coded for co-rumination behaviors. In addition, instead of retrospective self-reports, future studies should aim to use daily-diary or experience-sampling methodologies. For example, White and Shih (2012) adapted the co-rumination questionnaire by Rose (2002) into a daily measure of co-rumination behaviors, changing questions to a specific behavior that happened “today”. Future research could also include reports from peers and parents on the participant’s co-rumination tendencies. In addition, integrating diagnostic interviews to assess depressive symptoms when working with clinical samples may be an important step. Finally, the use of multiple methods could help disentangle the mixed pattern of associations between co-rumination and depressive symptoms.
The current research also has notable clinical implications. For instance, our results could be incorporated into existing prevention and treatment programs for depression. This information might be particularly useful in mental health literacy and first-aid programs aimed at emerging adults who tend to seek help from friends rather than professionals (Findlay & Sunderland, 2014; Ashoorian et al., 2019; Kutcher et al., 2016). These programs could particularly highlight the significance of paying attention to the kinds of dialogue that may arise within one’s social environment and who individuals disclose to in addition to focusing on individual cognitions.
Conclusion
Taken together, results from the current study point to promising directions for understanding emotion regulation strategies enacted within emerging adult friendships. Specifically, findings suggest that friendships are important contexts for regulating emotions, and that these co-regulation behaviors have important associations with well-being for young adults. Our findings demonstrate that the link between co-rumination and depressive symptoms depended on individual propensities to engage in cognitive reappraisal, but not on rumination. Future studies should aim to assess other potential moderators, such as stress. A significant contribution of our study is that it took into account individual-coping strategies when evaluating the link between co-rumination and depressive symptoms. It also represents an improvement over past studies by using independent reports of symptoms and coping. Furthermore, conducting this research on emerging adults was an important step as most previous studies have only assessed the relation between co-rumination and depressive symptoms in early or mid-adolescence. Overall, the current study filled an important gap in the field about relational factors that can strengthen versus weaken the extent to which co-rumination leads to depressive experiences in emerging adults.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Concordia University Individual Seed/Accelerator; Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec, Chercheur Boursier Junior 1 (grant #29172).
