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Girl Talk and Co-rumination

Posted by Dante on 2008-September-11 17:39:56 EDT, Thursday
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Recently female friendship and girl talk, particularly among adolescents, has drawn growing interest from psychologists and researchers examining the question of how much talking is too much talking. Some studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.

The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say.

The research distinguishes between sharing or “self-disclosure,” which is associated with positive friendships and positive feelings, and dwelling on problems, concerns and frustrations. Dwelling and rehashing issues can keep girls, who are more prone to depression and anxiety than boys, stuck in negative thinking patterns, psychologists say. But they also say it is a mixed picture: friends who co-ruminate tend to be close, and those intimate relationships can build self-esteem.

“It’s a fine line,” said Joanne Davila, associate professor of psychology at the State University at Stony Brook, whose paper on co-rumination is being published by the Journal of Adolescence. “We want to encourage young girls to have friends and to use their friends for support, but we may want to help them learn how to use more active techniques. So if there is a problem, how do you solve it?”

In Jill Price's book The Woman Who Can't Forget she contrasts her own strange experience of Memory with its normal functions which depend on some degree of forgetting. In the course of this she mentions the destructive powers of Rumination.

And I can attest from my own adolescence that even teen boys can spend too much time ruminating on the negative. You think that excessive time spent in analysis of a problem will eventually provide a solution despite evidence to the contrary.

Dante

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