Depressive ruminators are able to update and do not 'cling' to negative (mis)information

What is it about?

People often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning after they have acknowledged a retraction; this phenomenon is known as the continued-influence effect. Retractions can be particularly ineffective when the retracted misinformation is consistent with a pre-existing worldview. We investigated this effect in the context of depressive rumination. Given the prevalence of depressotypic worldviews in depressive rumination, we hypothesised that depressive rumination may affect the processing of retractions of valenced misinformation; specifically, we predicted that the retraction of negative misinformation might be less effective in depressive ruminators. In two experiments, we found evidence against this hypothesis: in depressive ruminators, retractions of negative misinformation were at least as effective as they were in control participants, and more effective than retractions of positive misinformation. Findings are interpreted in terms of an attentional bias that may enhance the salience of negative misinformation and may thus facilitate its updating in depressive rumination.

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Why is it important?

The findings are contrary to the literature on memory updating in depressive rumination. However, our understanding of updating in depressive rumination is largely based on response-time and list-recall measures which investigates individual micro-level cognitive processes. The CIE paradigm involves conceptual updating and may have stronger ecological validity as it mimics real-world updating situations. The findings has implications for cognitive-behavioral therapy or treatment that targets individual micro-level processes: therapy that targets individual cognitive processes such as a negative attentional bias may enhance memory updating in response-time tasks at the expense of conceptual updating which may have stronger ecological validity as it mimics real-world updating situations.

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