Effect of coping strategies on metacognitive awareness to positive and negative facial expression in adolescents

Abstract

Previous literature has ascertained that depressed and ruminative individuals respectively demonstrated biases in attentional orientation towards sad facial emotion stimuli. Studies have also established positive relationship between metacognitive beliefs about rumination on the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms. To our knowledge, few studies have examined the mechanism by which rumination as a coping strategy is associated with perceptual bias of negative emotion stimuli in depressed individuals. Furthermore, most of the studies have focused their investigations using the adult populations. The aim of this present study was to examine the effect of ruminative coping strategy on processing facial emotional stimuli in adolescents with depressive symptoms, and whether such effect also occurred at the level of metacognitive awareness. Eighty-five secondary school students between the ages of 13-16 years (M = 14.15, SD = 0.81) were recruited from local mainstream schools. Levels of depressive symptoms and levels of ruminative coping strategy were measured by self-report questionnaire. Participants were also instructed to complete a facial emotion discrimination task with confidence ratings for measuring metacognitive awareness. The results showed that ruminative coping strategy was associated with bias processing towards sad faces in low depressive state but not in high depressive state. The findings also showed that ruminative copying strategy was predictive of perceptual bias towards sad faces at a metacognitive level when participants were in low depressive state but not at high depressive state. The present study extended previous research in highlighting a possible causal relationship of ruminative coping on perceptual bias for negative emotions at a metacognitive level. Implications and suggestions for future research directions were discussed.