Rumination and Its Relationship with Psychological Distress: Exploring the Moderating Role of Reflective Functioning among Female College Students

Psychological distress among university students is a growing public health concern, and cognitive aspects such as rumination have been recognized as contributing factors to the development and maintenance of psychological distress. The study aimed to examine the relationship between brooding rumination and psychological distress and determine the moderation effect of reflective functioning, i.e., hypomentalization, on this relationship among female college students. A quantitative correlational study using a moderation analysis was employed to examine the relationship between the variables with a total of 163 female college students of Banasthali Vidyapith who were recruited for the study. The study employed the Brooding Subscale of the Ruminative Responses Scale (Treynor et al., 2003), the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ-R-7) (Fonagy et al., 2016; Horváth et al., 2023), and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-10) (Kessler et al., 2002) to measure brooding rumination, reflective functioning, and psychological distress, respectively. Descriptive statistics showed moderate levels and Pearson’s product-moment correlation analysis showed a positive significant relationship between brooding rumination and psychological distress (r = 0.43, p < 0.01), between brooding rumination and reflective functioning (r = 0.47, p < 0.01), and between reflective functioning and psychological distress (r = 0.54, p < 0.01). Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to test the moderation hypothesis. While both brooding rumination and reflective functioning showed a significant main effect on psychological distress, the moderation effect was not significant. Thus, the study suggests that brooding rumination and reflective functioning function as two independent vulnerability factors rather than an interrelated factor. The study contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between rumination and reflective functioning together in a non-clinical population of female college students and highlights the need to address both rumination and mentalizing in the treatment of psychological distress in college students.