La interferencia de las rumiaciones obsesivas en la atención

Abstract

THE INTERFERENCE OF RUMINATION ON ATTENTION (DOCTORAL THESIS) AUTHOR: Tatiana Fernández Marcos DIRECTOR: José Santacreu Mas CODIRECTOR: Ana Calero Elvira Abstract (English version) The interest in this doctoral dissertation arises during my work as a clinical psychologist at the CPA (Center for Applied Psychology) of UAM where, among many psychological problems that are addressed, we find people with persistent worries that take the form of obsessive ruminations. Obsessive ruminations, beyond the associated discomfort they cause, generate in the person who suffer them difficulties in concentration in their daily activities. The literature shows the relationship between obsessive rumination and low performance in attention tasks. Despite this, there is no conclusive evidence on this relationship. Specifically on what kind of attention and attention measures would be interfered by obsessive rumination; about what intensity, frequency, and duration of thought is necessary to interfere in attention and about which people are more prone to show a decrement in attention caused by ruminations. This doctoral dissertation aims to contribute initially to the study of these issues through the development of three empirical studies. The first one aims to study the suitability of three attention tasks to detect an increase in negative thoughts and it is done by studying the temporal stability and the convergent validity of these tasks, which register measures of time and accuracy and which correspond to the three types of attention: sustained, selective and attentional control. The second study analyzes the effect of rumination on attention tasks through the experimental manipulation of negative thoughts. In turn, it studies the relationship between subclinical scores of two measures of obsessive ruminations and performance in attention tasks. The third study delves into the causal relationship between rumination and low performance in attention. To do this, the performances in attention tasks are compared under five conditions of cognitive load generated by the combination of rumination, a memory activity and an external auditory distractor. The comparison between groups is done for three different samples: people with high scores in three different measures of rumination. In the present dissertation, the three studies are preceded by the review of the study of the attention process throughout history, by the review of the different models that explain the distraction and by the description of the most relevant objective tasks for the study of attention. At the same time, we present the psychopathological problem called "obsessive ruminations", their etiology, the instruments that are used for their evaluation and what is known until the moment of the interference that they cause in attention.