Rumination, Digestive

The ALEQ assesses a broad range of negative life events that typically occur among adolescents, including school/achievement problems, friendship and romantic difficulties, and family problems. Examples of items from the ALEQ include “got a bad report card” to assess school events, “had an argument with a close friend” for friendship events, “boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with you but you still want to go out with them” for romantic events, and “your parents grounded you” for family events. Youth were asked to indicate how often (Likert scale ranging from never (0) to always (4)) these negative events had occurred to them over the past 5 weeks. These ratings were then transformed into dichotomous count of stressors (0=no event; 1=event occurred). The dichotomized ALEQ were used to assess a count of stressors with higher scores indicating more exposure to negative events at a particular time point over the past 5 weeks. The ALEQ demonstrated good validity in past research (Hankin, 2008 ; Hankin et al., in press ).
The 57 different negative life events included in the ALEQ can be categorized into events occurring in an interpersonal (e.g., peers, romantic partners, family) and non-interpersonal (e.g. academics, work) domains (see Hankin & Abramson, 2002 (link)) as well as independent versus dependent types of events. Independent events are those that are believed to befall individuals and are not expected to be related to a person’s characteristics (e.g., close friend moves, death of a relative), whereas dependent events are those that the individual’s characteristics or behaviors may have contributed to the occurrence of these events (e.g., fight with friend, romantic breakup). To create variables for interpersonal and non-interpersonal events as well as independent and dependent events, the list of 57 stressors was categorized independently by the authors with 100% agreement. This resulted in 39 interpersonal events (26 of these as dependent, 13 of these as independent) and 11 as non-interpersonal events (all were categorized as dependent). Seven events were not clearly interpersonal or non-interpersonal, and so they were not included in these categorized variables. Examples for the interpersonal-dependent category of event include: “You had an argument with a close friend,” “Your parents grounded you,” “Your boyfriend/girlfriend criticized you,” and “A boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with you but you still wanted to be with them.” For interpersonal-independent, examples include: “A close friend moved away,” “A close family member couldn’t work due to injury or illness,” and “close family member (parent, sibling) died.” For non-interpersonal events, examples include: “Did poorly on, or failed, a test or class project,” “You didn’t complete the required homework for class,” and “You had to do chores or work you didn’t want to do.” The ALEQ was given at all 4 time points. For the present study, the following variables, interpersonal-dependent, interpersonal-independent, and non-interpersonal, at each of the 4 time points, were used in analyses to test our hypothesis that co-rumination would predict interpersonal-dependent stress generation better than interpersonal-independent or non-interpersonal events.