The Impact Of Rumination On Emotional Sensitivity

Emotions play a very important role in interpersonal communication. An individual’ s behavior is closely tied to his or her affective state, and perception of the emotional state of an interaction partner accordingly guides social interactions. Facial expressions are a reliable source of information regarding an individual’s emotional state, the ability to accurately identify and respond to facial expressions is a vital component of effective interpersonal communication and interaction. Impairment of the ability to identify facial expressions and accurately respond to facial expressions may lead to misunderstandings and problems with social functioning.The concept of emotional sensitivity in the present research is the ability to perceive the emotional state of an interaction partner in the process of interpersonal communication and cognition plays the initiative role, while emotion plays the passive role. Past research has shown that high degree of depressed individuals have negative bias to perceive the facial expressions,and lack the ability to accurately identify facial expressions.In addition, high degree of depressed individuals also express their emotion more slowly or invalid.Rumination, a concept in psychology, derives from biology and is defined from the extension of rumination phenomenon in zoology. Nolen-Hoeksema is the first researcher who specializes in the study of rumination and his research is focused on the relationship between rumination and depression. He regards the rumination as a coping style, and uses rumination style to describe the negative thinking. Nolen-Hoeksema defines the rumination that individuals are persistently focused on their own behavior and thoughts unconsciously, thinking about the negative emotional states, the possible reasons to the negative emotional states, the possible consequences of the negative emotional states and details of the case abidingly and repeatedly. However, they don’t proactively solve the problems facing in life. Now a lot of people are saying that rumination is associated with positive emotions and negative emotions, that is to say, rumination is divided into adaptive rumination and non-adaptive rumination. Nevertheless, previous studies were focused on the non-adaptive rumination and numerous studies demonstrated that the tendency to ruminate is associated prospectively with increases in depressive symptoms.The present research controled the level of depression, using the theory of signal detection measured the emotional sensitivity of happy display and sad display, tring to study the impact of rumination on emotional sensitivity. The experimental results show that:(1)Participants were sensitive to the differences between posed and genuine displays of happy or sad emotion.(2)Participants who scored higher rumination points would show lower sensitivity to the affective state of others.(3)Participants showed higher happy emotional sensitivity than sad emotional sensitivity.(4)The rumination scores had a significant impact on happy emotional sensitivity, that is to say, participants who scored higher rumination points would show lower sensitivity to the happy affective state of others; while the rumination scores had no significant impact on sad emotional sensitivity.(5)The rumination scores of female participants and male participants had no significant differences.(6)Female participants and male participants had no significant differences on emotional sensitivity.