RUMINATION REFLECTION AND GENDER

Rumination Reflection and Gender

Rumination Reflection and Gender

Q1

Cognitions constitute perhaps the prototypic example of such irrational distrust and suspicion. Colby (1981) defined paranoid cognition as “persecutory delusions and false beliefs whose propositional content clusters around ideas of being harassed, threatened, harmed, subjugated, persecuted, accused, mistreated, wronged, tormented, disparaged, vilified, and so on, by malevolent others, either specific individuals or groups” (Colby, 2007).

In trying to understand these rather peculiar, and in many respects striking cognitions, theorists have turned most often to psychodynamic constructs. Colby (1981), for example, described paranoid cognitions as the end products of a “causal chain of strategies for dealing with distress induced by the affect of shame-humiliation” (p. 518). The strategy of blaming others for one's difficulties functions “to repudiate the belief that the self is to blame for an inadequacy” (Boyle, 2008). The presumption behind such clinical accounts is that paranoid cognitions are reflections or manifestations of an acute intrapsychic disturbance. Such conceptions thus locate the cause of paranoid cognitions “inside the head” of the social perceiver, rather than viewing them as causally connected to the social context within which such cognitions are embedded and to which they might reflect some sort of intended adaptation.

First, as just noted, distrust is not always irrational. Although individuals' fears and suspicions may sometimes be exaggerated, this does not mean that their distrust is necessarily without foundation or basically misplaced (Baumgartner 2006). When viewed from this perspective, psychological states such as vigilance and rumination may be useful. For example, vigilant appraisal and mindfulness —which might be construed as more adaptive variants of hypervigilance and rumination—are enormously important cognitive orientations that not only help individuals make sense of their social situations, but also help them determine the right forms of behavior for those situations.

From a social information processing perspective, situational factors trigger paranoid cognitions within organizations that bring on states of dysphoric self-consciousness, which is an aversive psychological state. People are motivated to make sense of whatever they perceive as inducing it and adaptively respond to it. These sense-making efforts promote a hypervigilant and ruminative mode of social information processing. Hypervigilance and rumination, I posit, enjoy a circular causal relationship: The hypervigilant appraisal of social information tends to generate more raw data about which the paranoid perceiver ruminates, and rumination in turn helps generate additional paranoid-like hypotheses, prompting more vigilant scrutiny of the situation, and especially of others' behavior ...