I have to say, I think there's something to be said for this. I'll preface by saying I think that processing and communication are both important, and I think that women are taught to share their feelings...where as young men are steered away from it. With that said, I also think that I have certainly fallen victim to "over-analysis." I won't speak for all women, but I, and many of my friends, have a tendency to just go over it and over it and over it...and I think it can have negative effects. In fact, I know this tendency has caused anxiety in my own life. I think this is more far-reaching than just affecting adolescent girls, but I certainly wouldn't say that all women do this...

I'm 23 years old and I still obsess over things. I think and I think and I think about something, trying to figure it all out. I know I'll drive myself crazy on day...but until then, I drive my friends crazy.

I know that I've experienced myself and my friends (male and female) increasing our anxiety by constantly talking about our fears or worries or frustrations or whatever. A little bit of processing and support is really important, a lot can reinforce a pattern of negative self-talk and emotions.

I'm not persuaded that this is unique to adolescents or women, and I'm a bit annoyed that this is in "fashion & style" not "health"

Yes. I agree with sillyfeminist...but I also think that one main reason that gossip and ruminating contributes to depression and anxiety in tweens and teens is because the focus is usually on something negative about someone else. All the negative perspective on others often creates anxiety about who's saying what YOU. and on top of that, it's depressing when you feel like everyone's nasty and backstabbing. I totally got stuck in these peer-bashing sesh's with my friends, and my mom told me later when I got older that it always pained her to overhear us, and was amazed at how much we dwelled on criticizing and judging others. A cultural problem? Just a phase? In any case, less judgement always seems to reduce depression & anxiety...so maybe educating teens about judging yourself and others and the relation to self-esteem is something educators could try implementing in curriculum.

Let's pathologize yet another subset of female emotions! Good going, NYT.

/snark

Seriously, though, there is nothing in the linked article that proves to me that a) this is actually an "overtalking of problems" or that b) talking through problems with one's friends is not just a natural way of dealing with adolescence. Especially for girls. Unlike boys, girls are socialized almost from birth to communicate with others in order to plan out a course of action that will satisfy everybody as much as possible, rather than simply acting on their own without considering everybody else's feelings on the matter. There's nothing wrong with that. Pathologizing a generally feminine relational style as the source of teenage girls' higher incidence of depression sounds to me like just so much victim-blaming bunk.

I think this is definitely a problem, especially with body image and eating habits. I know personally, whenever I'm around a group of girls and the subject of food comes up (which happens pretty much every day since I live with two females, although we are a little older) everyone starts freaking out about how much weight they gained or oh I ate this and this today, I am such a pig, etc. I think it is really unhealthy to harp on negative things like this and is probably an underlying cause for eating disorders and low self-esteem.

Following up on what Bethany said -- this is indeed not just an "adolescent girls" only thing. Boys/men do this too. Sometimes indeed it just re-enforces negativity and is quite pathological. But sometimes what ends up going on is a purging of negative thoughts -- in essence, mutual therapy.

And to expand on what literarycritic says ... it isn't just that

[u]nlike boys, girls are socialized almost from birth to communicate with others in order to plan out a course of action that will satisfy everybody as much as possible, rather than simply acting on their own without considering everybody else's feelings on the matter

at least in my experience as a former boy (now a man), boys are actively socialized not to try to satisfy others but rather to assert themselves and act on their own. And, speaking as a (hopefully recovered) Nice Guy(TM), I also am wont to point out that those boys who do not fully have assertiveness socialized into them and who don't just act on their own get nowhere in the (not surprisingly very gendered) world of heterosexual dating.

I used to do this as a teenager. It occasionally drove me sick with worry.

Now, because of all that "practice," I am able to pick over problems with amazing efficiency and find solutions that I couldn't have stumbled upon if I wasn't good at "talking a topic to the ground." I don't think that the problem is the processing itself, more that teenagers aren't necessarily good at it yet. Like a lot of things, people just need to practice.

Also, a lot of my male friends do this too.

My experience has been the opposite of policlit's. I think the biggest problem is girls putting themselves down. Girls are often extremely hard on themselves. I think the behaviors policlit mentions are outcome of this self-hate, both cruelty to outsiders in order to build themselves up and cruelty to friends in an effort to "improve them" they way they feel they need to be improved themselves. It can also simply result in depression. I've had several friends that I had to spend long conversations trying to convince them they were smart, pretty, socially capable, important, etc. They always wanted to take the side arguing against themselves, as if they couldn't convince themselves that they were worthwhile and needed me to show them the way out of the intellectual prison they'd built.

I don't know if that cycle of arguing is better or worse than the alternatives (what ARE the alternatives, anyways?), but I do know that the "overanalysis" the article talks about is a SYMPTOM and not a ROOT CAUSE of the problem. The root cause is girls being bombarded with the idea that they only matter if they have a boyfriend, if they're pretty, if they always please others, if they're perfect and never mess up...

Either way, the solution is not to demonize the desperate attempts of young women to talk their way out of the cultural trap they're stuck in (whether or not that trap causes more anxiety itself). The solution is to start letting girls be independent human beings, valued for their sheer humanness. It's to start teaching girls positive ways to balance self and other. It's to start teaching girls coping methods that don't involve either hurting themselves or hurting each other. It's to stop making "confidence" just another burdensome quality required to attract boys and "succeed" in life, and to turn it into a shield against the unfair judgment girls are constantly bombarded with.

And, speaking as a (hopefully recovered) Nice Guy(TM), I also am wont to point out that those boys who do not fully have assertiveness socialized into them and who don't just act on their own get nowhere in the (not surprisingly very gendered) world of heterosexual dating.

Er... methinks you have some more recovering to do. Trust me, the uber-masculine types that you're describing are the ones that truly don't get anywhere worth going in the dating scene. The kind of "assertiveness" that encourages males to act unilaterally is what leads some guys to cheat and lie their way through their relationships all through high school and college, then get passed over repeatedly once women reach the age where they're wise to their antics before they even start (if the guys haven't matured by then, that is).

You know I have a friend, and one time this guy she was casually sleeping with bought her a slurpee. I think she spent at least an hour solid going back and forth over whether or not him buying her a slurpee meant they were actually dating. (Apparently my, "Maybe you should have a real conversation with him about your relationship" advice was just asking to much at 17.)

Anyway, it doesn't really get into how they prove that Co-rumination is the CAUSE of anxiety, depression, and all the other stuff they are blaming it on. I hate to just assume they are using a correlative study, but I'm not really sure how else one would study this, so I'm going to assume that, because they have given me no other info.

It seems more likely to me that Co-Rumination, especially on negative things, is a symptom, not a cause of anxiety/depression. Feeling unsure of yourself and sad is exactly the kind of thing that would lead you to go to your friend to vent, or analyze your problems.

It also doesn't surprise me that women Co-ruminate more than men when looked at from this perspective.

@ politiclit:

I think you bring up a good point. It's funny how, after reading the original post, I just assumed that the topic that was being co-ruminated was negative to begin with with...which I guess ties in to my origianl point. If you are constantly in a negative head space, it's no wonder that you're going to experience anxiety as a result. So maybe the focus shouldn't be on the fact that we're talking, but what we're talking about. I think it all goes back to this part of female culture that just breeds negativity, judgement, and competition between ourselves.

It is certainly possible to "co-ruminate" I'd say that there's some correlation between immaturity and being socialized to please your peers by being perfect that could make it more of an issue for adolescent females. Is it strictly limited to them? heck no.

I'd reckon it's more likely a symptom of depression and anxiety than a cause. It likely contributes, but all symptoms of depression contribute to it, which is why depression is such an insidious illness, and rather than demonizing "female" habits, and degrading the people who partake in them, we should be looking at constructive ways to fix it.

I second the voices saying that co-rumination about negative thoughts is an effect of negative pressures on girls' lives, and while it might reinforce them, it's not a cause.

I've heard this sort of argument, in a sense, extended onto feminism. Some people say focusing on negative aspects of life (i.e. alleged inequalities, etc.) lead to negative thoughts.

Well, and so I say: critical thinking necessarily involves recognizing negative aspects of life. Does that mean we just shouldn't acknowledge real problems? It would relieve stress and energy spent thinking, but wouldn't prevent stress from the real, underlying problems continuing...

Hell, I co-ruminate now! Of course they co-ruminate (not all, I'm sure, but all the girls I knew seemed to). But that's just because it's so hard to be an adolescent girl. You're supposed to be sexy but not have sex, get good grades but not let the boys know you're smart, be thin but still have enough fat to grow breasts....It's incredibly stressful. Boys probably don't co-ruminate because there is a social stigma attached to boys sharing their feelings, but the flip-side of girls being able to share feelings without social reprecussion is surely that they compound their problems with group fixations on the same things!

I'm with nightingale here... I'm not a psychiatrist or anything, but isn't excessive worry of this kind a symptom of anxiety or depression? So if you do a study tracking people who exhibit symptoms of anxiety, it isn't all that surprising that many of them might, you know, have anxiety.

'This just in--many people who sneeze non-stop during allergy season also seem to have allergies! Sneezing must cause allergies!'

I agree with what a lot of people are saying: talking isn't bad. What's bad is that so many girls have self esteem issues,and this is what they're talking about. The problem is that we aren't dealing enough with their feelings, so they keep harboring them until they can talk to their like-minded friends.

Not all teenage girls do this. I didn't, mainly because I have Asperger syndrome. I didn't get hour-long phone calls, or any phone calls for that matter.

That doesn't mean I didn't have those thought patterns. I probably have more of them than others; I don't have an outlet for them, though. Does this contribute to anxiety and depression? Yes.

My point is that the "co-rumination" behaviors described here are likely an effect, not a cause. I would think they're beneficial to a degree.

First off, would boys benefit from doing this- obviously not, from this story, girls don't even benefit from it.

Secondly, this story seems to confirm in part a traditional viewpoint that females, because of increased estrogen and emotions, tend to have a harder time with problem solving (ex. talking a problem into the ground, simply talking and dwelling on a problem instead of focusing on solutions, over-exaggerating, and over-analyzing issues instead of using clear logical thinking.)

Perhaps, during some of this nations strongest periods of growth, power and prosperity (turn of the century through 40's, 50's and 60's), there is a correlation, in terms of efficiency, between this growth and traditional gender roles being utilized (men in jobs utilizing more logic and critical thinking skills and women in jobs where they could utilize there emotions more.

*blink*

indyKat, are you sure you're on the right blog?

First, -not- all girls or women engage in this behavior pattern, not even in the US, much less worldwide. Thus is it extremely unlikely that this is a wholly biologically-driven behavior.

Second, men actually do have hormones and emotions. In contemporary US culture, they tend to be socialized from a very early age to avoid displaying a wide range of those emotions (being told not to cry like a girl, for example), which is why you American men displaying certain emotions like sadness less often. 'Emotion,' incidentally, also includes happiness, excitement, irritation, anger, and a whole host of other feelings which you see displayed by all genders quite often! To suggest that women have 'increased emotions' is not only exceedingly vague but also simply untrue.

As to your hypothesis suggesting that 'traditional' gender roles correlate to high economic growth... I can only assume that you're trolling, posting something like that on a feminist blog. But I could pick it apart a little anyway. To begin with, if by 'traditional' gender roles you mean Leave it to Beaver-style nuclear families with stay-at-home mothers, you're talking about a small segment of American society and only part of that period. Remember Rosie the Riveter? Many women worked during WWII. It was also quite common for poorer women to need to work in the 40s and 50s. All of those working women played a part in the economic growth you speak of.

But the kicker is how much -more- growth there has been since 1960! Has anyone else noticed that the US economy managed not to collapse entirely when increasing numbers of women entered the workforce in the 60s, 70s, and 80s? In fact, the economy continue to be surprisingly functional even now*, despite all those 'emotional' women doing their emotional work--you know, like running businesses, practicing medicine and law, running research labs. Woman stuff.

*Yes, we appear to be in something of a recession at the moment. But from what I understand economists have estimated that only 10-15% of the recession was a result of irrational emotional outbursts and estrogen. Mostly it's a result of increasing energy prices, the housing/lending crisis, and the sagging dollar. Incidentally, the institutions responsible for many of these things are by and large headed by logical, problem-solving men. Go figure.

I have always thought that us gals benefit from "over" thinking and reviewing our many conclusions with friends. It's kept me realitively sane all these years!

human bean, perhaps the problems and economic recession we are in has less to do with the imaginary collective of males you are talking about and more to do with, in part, todays culture that forces everyone to play nice with each other and says just because something can be done- means it must be done.

human bean, that was great :)

i agree with tomorrowshorizon about this being a manifestation of all the cultural baggage we dump onto adolescent girls. trap, indeed.

anyway, i'm a big co-ruminator, guilty as charged. i do find that talking out problems with a variety of different people CAN help one arrive at a solution, or at least receive reassurance and empathy and i don't think that's bad. boys could probably benefit by being socialized more toward overanalyzing, sure. but there's always a downside and too much of just about anything is a bad thing. it's easy to go over somethign so many times in your head or in conversation and just drive yourself crazy. it's something that i am trying to work on reducing in my own life, simply to get rid of the crazy, but i wouldn't want to entirely eliminate the tendency. hell, at this point it feels like a part of my personality to be incredibly neurotic and overanalyze. i'd just like to be able to use the skill when it's helpful and resist the compulsion when it's not.

i do feel that this tendency, at least as it is disproportionately present in adolescent girls, is cultural and it would probably get better if we could rid ourselves of the enormous pressure we put on them. until then, i like that the article mentioned the girls who looked for a solution in the american girls book and i think that it's a good idea to encourage this kind of active response, so that the co-ruminating doesn't just go in circles without making anyone feel better about their problems.

It's very important for our emotional health not to dwell on things that we absolutely have no control over.

Hmmm... I think co-ruminating would be hard to define. Certainly talking to others about things that are bothering you is a lot healthier than bottling it up. At what point does it become unhealthy? However, I can see where going back and forth forever on certain topics could be unhealthy, especially if they are topics such as if a boy will call or things you don't like about your appearance. However, I feel co-ruminating is not the cause of the problem but rather a visible symptom. The girl who is co-ruminating is already obsessing over the topic in her head, the constant discussions about the topic with a friend are in that way the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps if you have a group of girls who have obsessive worries they could influence a girl who doesn't to the point where she begins to obsess about worries in the same manner, but I believe usually the co-rumination is simply a result of the girl's tortured thoughts. Luckily for me since I do tend to ruminate too much I have friends (and as a teen had friends) who did the opposite. They listened and discussed my and their problems but they were not afraid to call me out on being ridiculous or overly dramatic and give me a reality check when it continued too long. I really think that dwelling mentally on a problem too long is the root of the problem instead of the discussion about it.

Hmmm... I think co-ruminating would be hard to define. Certainly talking to others about things that are bothering you is a lot healthier than bottling it up. At what point does it become unhealthy? However, I can see where going back and forth forever on certain topics could be unhealthy, especially if they are topics such as if a boy will call or things you don't like about your appearance. However, I feel co-ruminating is not the cause of the problem but rather a visible symptom. The girl who is co-ruminating is already obsessing over the topic in her head, the constant discussions about the topic with a friend are in that way the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps if you have a group of girls who have obsessive worries they could influence a girl who doesn't to the point where she begins to obsess about worries in the same manner, but I believe usually the co-rumination is simply a result of the girl's tortured thoughts. Luckily for me since I do tend to ruminate too much I have friends (and as a teen had friends) who did the opposite. They listened and discussed my and their problems but they were not afraid to call me out on being ridiculous or overly dramatic and give me a reality check when it continued too long. I really think that dwelling mentally on a problem too long is the root of the problem instead of the discussion about it.

"perhaps the problems and economic recession we are in has less to do with the imaginary collective of males you are talking about and more to do with, in part, todays culture that forces everyone to play nice with each other and says just because something can be done- means it must be done."

First of all, I saw no "imaginary collective of males" in Human Bean's comment. What are you talking about?

Second, can you give an example of modern western culture saying that "just because something can be done means it must be done"?

And third, do you have any evidence to back up this claim that encouraging people to cooperate has a negative effect on the economy?

Well, I am a teen girl and I honestly think I do over analize things but if I don't talk about it with my friends and talk about all the things it could affect or whatever I feel like it really eats away at me and I actually find myself being tapped in myself if I don't work it out properly (this is no exaggeration) and sometimes even though I feel like this for moths at times once i've worked out everything about it and properly understood my feelings and other people's feelings it does help.

first off, i also am annoyed at the placement of the article under "fashion and style".

this IS an interesting article about co-rumination.

i think that while it may seem more prevalent among adolescent girls, co-rumination is not entirely lost among adolescent boys-many of my male friends [a slightly older age bracket i must confess] also partake in co-rumination.

while i share a lot of the thoughts already posted,
i really want to emphasize another direction one could go with this article and that is the link not between the actual talking/frequently describing etc... but the link between what these girls are talking about and focusing on that are supposedly making them so depressed of which THEN i would agree that the placement of the article under "fashion and style" would seem appropriate.

overall. i remember these days-what am i talking about- i still go to my friends.