Teen victimization, rumination, adult depression, and aggression

This is a lengthy article but I find its content fascinating, especially in light of growing evidence of teen victimization, especially online. Malamut & Salmivalli (2023) published “Adolescent Victimization Predicts Adult Depression and Aggression: The role of rumination” in Developmental Psychology. Here’s the highly edited article:

Victimization during school years can have detrimental effects on individuals’ adjustment, lasting even into adulthood. In the current study, we examine whether there is an indirect effect of victimization on adult depression and aggression, via sad and angry rumination about past victimization. Participants included 1,319 Finnish individuals (59.5% identified as women; 97.4 native Finns) who were followed from adolescence into adulthood (Mage = 25.78, SD = 1.35). Victimization was indirectly associated with adult depression and aggression, through sad and angry ruminations, respectively. The findings suggest that intervention efforts targeting rumination could help victimized individuals avoid lasting ill effects from their experiences.  

Frequent exposure to victimization can negatively affect youth’s emotion regulation and coping strategies. Peer victimization can be considered a form of interpersonal trauma, leading to traumatic stress symptoms such as intrusive thoughts about past victimization experiences (Jenkins et al., 2022). Consistent with this conceptualization, victimization is positively associated with a general tendency toward rumination (Feinstein et al., 2014)—a maladaptive and involuntary stress response that includes repetitive, intrusive cognitions and dwelling on one’s distress. Victimized youth may ruminate more in general, but they also ruminate specifically on social stressors, including past experiences of victimization. Rumination, in turn, is a risk factor for both internalizing and externalizing problems, and may play an important role in the link between victimization and subsequent maladjustment.

When considering rumination as a possible mechanism, it is important to consider that rumination can elicit feelings of sadness and/or anger. Individuals who have been victimized may experience lingering effects into adulthood (including depressive symptoms and aggression) because they dwell on their painful, potentially traumatic experiences, which can lead to persistent feelings of sadness or anger. The type of emotions elicited by rumination might influence the extent to which victimization leads to adult depression versus aggression. Sad rumination is linked to internalizing difficulties, whereas angry rumination has been found to predict externalizing problems. Indeed, (sad) rumination plays a key role in the development and maintenance of depression, in part because rumination is an “emotion-focused” coping strategy.

Participants included Finnish individuals who had participated in a large longitudinal project in Grades 4–9 (N = 22,135; see Kärnä et al., 2011, 2013), with a follow-up study conducted 13 years later when they were young adults. In total, 3489 participants (Mage = 12.76, SD = 2.10 in the initial study) responded to the follow-up study (15.8% of the original sample). 

In a sample of young adults who had experienced at least some victimization in adolescence, we found support that rumination about past victimization played a key role in the long-term associations between victimization and adult depression and aggression. To our knowledge, this is the first study to identify sad and angry rumination about past victimization as underlying mechanisms of the link between frequent adolescent victimization and subsequent adult adjustment.

Past research has highlighted that victimization is a risk factor for both internalizing and externalizing problems and such linkages might be especially strong in adolescence. Frequent adolescent victimization was positively associated with sad and angry rumination, which in turn were positively associated with depression and aggression, respectively. Therefore, one pathway explaining why adolescent victimization can lead to negative adjustment in adulthood may be the tendency to dwell on these negative, harmful experiences, and the extent to which such rumination elicits sadness or anger.

We also tested the opposite pathway—victimization leading to rumination via depression or aggression. We found little evidence of an indirect effect from victimization to rumination via adjustment (this was only the case for self-reported victimization leading to rumination via aggression). Thus, even though adult adjustment and rumination were positively correlated, we found stronger support for our hypothesized indirect effects than the opposite ones.

This study demonstrated that intrusive and repetitive thoughts about victimization experiences are an important mechanism related to the long-term adjustment of victimized adolescents. 

This study highlights the importance of differentiating between sad and angry rumination. Although strongly correlated, they had different implications for adjustment (i.e., the indirect effect of victimization on aggression via sad rumination was not significant, nor was the indirect effect on depression via angry rumination). Future research (e.g., with person-centered analyses) should examine whether different subgroups of ruminators can be identified, as well as factors that predict engaging in sad and/or angry rumination (e.g., self- vs. other-blaming attributions for victimization).

Although it is still critical for interventions to decrease overall bullying levels in the peer group, our findings underscore the importance of also providing victimized youth with support to avoid developing maladaptive coping strategies. Moreover, it is important to help adults who are still suffering the negative consequences of victimization to process and let go of their painful memories. For example, mindfulness interventions and rumination-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy have been shown to decrease rumination (e.g., Hilt & Swords, 2021).

Although studies have examined pathways that underlie the short-term negative consequences of victimization, less is known regarding pathways that underlie the link between youth’s victimization and subsequent adjustment difficulties in adulthood. The current study fills this gap by demonstrating that one pathway in which victimization during school years can negatively impact adult adjustment (i.e., adult depression and aggression) is via sad and angry rumination on past victimization. Rumination—particularly about past victimization—appears to be a key factor to target to help victimized youth avoid ill effects from their victimization lasting into adulthood.

I think this study is important in highlighting the role of rumination, distinguishing angry from sad rumination, and investigating the directionality of the relationships. It makes it clear that it is critical to ask teens about experiences of victimization and intervene appropriately to mitigate the negative long-term consequences in adult life.