Gender differences in rumination: A meta-analysis
Johnson and Whisman meta-analysed fifty-nine studies, covering more than fourteen thousand adults, on whether women ruminate more than men. The question matters because the leading theory of why depression is roughly twice as common in women partly rests on it. Women did score higher, and on both subtypes, the brooding kind associated with worse outcomes and the more reflective kind. But the differences were small, with no sign of publication bias or of the studies disagreeing among themselves, which makes the small size a solid finding rather than a noisy one. The honest reading is that a small difference in rumination cannot carry the weight of explaining a twofold difference in depression, and this vault should cite the paper for that limitation as much as for the difference itself.
Johnson and Whisman meta-analysed fifty-nine studies, covering more than fourteen thousand adults, on whether women ruminate more than men. The question matters because the leading theory of why depression is roughly twice as common in women partly rests on it. Women did score higher, and on both subtypes, the brooding kind associated with worse outcomes and the more reflective kind. But the differences were small, with no sign of publication bias or of the studies disagreeing among themselves, which makes the small size a solid finding rather than a noisy one. The honest reading is that a small difference in rumination cannot carry the weight of explaining a twofold difference in depression, and this vault should cite the paper for that limitation as much as for the difference itself.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
59 studies, 14,321 adults, 23 studies for the subtypes. Rumination d = 0.24, brooding d = 0.19, reflection d = 0.17, all statistically significant and all described by the authors as small.
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- Why You Lie Awake at 3am Replaying One Conversation, Why We Care
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.03.019
DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2013.03.019