Longitudinal Association Between Event‐Related Rumination and Posttraumatic Growth: Latent Growth Curve Mediation Model

ABSTRACT The existing literature on posttraumatic growth has supported the mediating role of deliberate rumination (DR) between intrusive rumination (IR) and posttraumatic growth (PTG). However, limited studies have examined the interplay between the change components of rumination and PTG, limiting our understanding to the momentary association at a given time. Therefore, this study aimed to distinguish the rumination and PTG variables into intercept and slope factors and examine the mediation effect. Participants were 552 adults ( M age = 38.27, SD age = 12.15) recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. In total, data collection occurred at nine timepoints, starting in April 2020 and ending in April 2023. Consistent with the existing cross‐sectional research, we found a full mediation model where DR mediated the relation between IR and PTG, all measured at Time 1. However, we found none of these scores measured at Time 1 of our data were associated with the change components of rumination and PTG. Similarly, when focussing on the change components, we identified a full mediation model between IR and PTG via DR. However, no significant association was found with the Time 1 scores of the variables. These results highlight the importance of focussing on the changes in rumination when predicting changes in PTG and supporting the continuous engagement of intentional rumination over time in predicting future changes in PTG.