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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present evidence that dysphoric rumination involves a working memory (WM) updating deficit. Sixty-one undergraduates—pre-screened with rumination and depression scales—completed a novel task providing a specific measure of WM updating. This task involved the substitution of emotionally-valenced words, and provided an online measure of the time taken to remove outdated items from WM. Results showed that dysphoric ruminators spent less time removing outdated words from WM when the new to-be-remembered word was negative. This effect was (1) associated with impaired subsequent recall of negative words, arguably caused by interference from the insufficiently removed outdated words; and (2) correlated with participants’ rumination scores. This is the first study to use the novel removal task to investigate the nature of WM-updating impairments in rumination. The findings are consistent with a negative attentional bias in rumination, and provide preliminary evidence that rumination is associated with a valence-generic removal deficit during WM updating. Reducing the attentional bias could thus be an intervention target in the treatment of dysphoric rumination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]