Are happier people less vulnerable to rumination, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress? Evidence from a large scale disaster

Training Positive Rumination in Expressive Writing to Enhance Psychological Adjustment and Working Memory Updating for Maladaptive Ruminators

Rumination is associated with psychological adjustment and working memory (WM) capacity. Studies have shown that psychological interventions can reduce negative rumination and improve psychological adjustment and WM capacity. The present study investigated the effect of positive rumination training in expressive writing on psychological adjustment and WM updating capacity. Within an experimental design, positive rumination was manipulated for 10 participants who were maladaptive ruminators in an experiment using a 5-week training compared to the control group with nine participants. Results revealed significant enhancement of psychological adjustment and the response time (RT) of WM updating in the experimental group but not in the control group. The two groups did not show significant difference of all the variables in pretest. However, the experimental group showed significantly better outcomes than the control group in posttest. The results suggest that positive rumination training in expressive writing is effective and rumination has a causal influence on WM updating capacity.

Advances and Open Questions in the Science of Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is an extremely active area of research with about 170,000 articles and books published on the topic in the past 15 years. Methodological and theoretical advances have been notable in this period of time, with the increasing use of longitudinal and experimental designs allowing for a greater understanding of the predictors and outcomes that relate to SWB, along with the process that underlie these associations. In addition, theories about these processes have become more intricate, as findings reveal that many associations with SWB depend on people's culture and values and the context in which they live. This review provides an overview of many major areas of research, including the measurement of SWB, the demographic and personality-based predictors of SWB, and process-oriented accounts of individual differences in SWB. In addition, because a major new focus in recent years has been the development of national accounts of subjective well-being, we also review attempts to use SWB measures to guide policy decisions.