Lyubomirsky, S., Boehm, J. K., Kasri, F., & Zehm, K. (2008). The cognitive and hedonic costs of dwelling on negative experiences. Manuscript under review.

Increasing evidence suggests that multiple cognitive and motivational processes underlie individual differences in happiness (Lyubomirsky, 2001). One behavior that is associated with (un)happiness is self-reflection or dwelling. We hypothesized that chronically unhappy individuals would be more inclined than their happier peers to dwell about themselves, their outcomes, and their moods, and that this behavior was expected to have a variety of adverse consequences. Four studies tested this hypothesis in several contexts. We predicted that, after exposure to unfavorable feedback, unhappy participants would be more likely to dwell about its implications than happy ones and, hence, show impaired attention during important academic tasks. In Studies 1-3, happy and unhappy students were led to believe that they either “succeeded” or “failed” relative to peers at an anagram-solving task. Results showed that unhappy participants who had failed subsequently displayed increased negative, interfering thoughts and, in Studies 2 and 3, spent the most time subsequently performing a portion of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). In Study 3, unhappy participants who had failed later demonstrated impaired reading comprehension on the GRE. Study 4 experimentally induced dwelling and found that the manipulation only adversely impacted unhappy participants. Implications of our results for the consequences of chronic and excessive dwelling for work and social functioning, as well as for detracting from enduring happiness, are discussed.