Running head: RUMINATION CAN BE BENEFICIAL Some Good News About Rumination: Task-Focused Thinking After Failure Facilitates Performance Improvement

Is there an adaptive side to rumination? We tested whether rumination that is focused on correcting past mistakes and active goal achievement could produce positive outcomes; this is in contrast to rumination that focuses on the implications of failure (i.e., state rumination) and taskirrelevant rumination. In all studies, participants received failure feedback on an initial task. A second task similar to the first provided an opportunity for improvement. Studies 1 and 2 manipulated type of ruminative thought such that it was action-focused, state-focused, or taskirrelevant. Action-focused rumination led to performance improvement relative to the other two conditions. Experiment 3 allowed participants to ruminate naturalistically. The more that participants’ rumination contained action-focused thoughts, the more their performance improved. Hence, rumination can yield benefits if it focuses on correcting errors and goal attainment. RUMINATION CAN BE BENEFICIAL 3 Some Good News About Rumination: Task-Focused Thinking After Failure Facilitates Performance Improvement Rumination is a fact of human life and common experience for many people. One puzzle is why it occurs. A wealth of research has shown rumination to be harmful in many ways and has found little or no evidence of any benefit. The present investigation sought to show a possible benefit from task-focused rumination in the hopes of helping those who chronically ruminate channel their thoughts into a healthier form of rumination.