The intentionality and content dimensions of mind wandering (MW) are important determinants of its costs and benefits. However, the relationship of intentionality with various combinations of different content dimensions has never been examined. In this study, we aimed to examine whether the content of intentional and unintentional MW differs in terms of temporal orientation, emotional valence, and combinations of these two factors. Results indicated that intentional and unintentional MW did not differ in the frequency of negative valence, whereas a difference was observed in the frequency of negative valence combined with temporal orientation. Unintentional MW was 4.88 times more likely than intentional MW to generate negative past-oriented content, while intentional MW was 2.61 times more likely to generate negative future-oriented content. Furthermore, when compared to intentional MW, unintentional MW was 1.94 times more likely to generate neutral past-oriented content, while intentional MW was 2.17 times more likely to generate positive future-oriented content. These findings show that intentional and unintentional MW have different effects on the content generated, depending on whether the content dimensions are considered separately or combined, which opens crucial new perspectives on understanding the functionality of MW.
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Does the intentionality of mind wandering affect the combined dimensions of temporal orientation and emotional valence?
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Mind wandering (MW) is a phenomenon in which attention is diverted from the current task and the external environment to engage in self-generated thoughts [1]. People spend approximately 10–50% of their waking hours engaged in MW, depending on the response options provided [2–7]. While it is a frequent mental activity, it tends to cause a sense of subjective unhappiness, a phenomenon that has attracted considerable attention in recent years [4].
Substantial evidence suggests that MW has dysfunctional aspects, such as those relating to negative affect or mood [4, 8–14], declining lesson performance in educational settings [15, 16], increased risk of traffic accidents [17, 18], and risk for medical errors [19, 20]; however, it has functional aspects as well, such as promoting autobiographical planning [21, 22] and creative thinking or creative problem-solving [23, 24, 25, 26], and is potentially related to emotional regulation [27, 28]. Hence, there are two opposed aspects of MW, and the factors that influence the costs and benefits of MW need to be clarified [29].
The content regulation hypothesis suggests the importance of focusing on the dimensions of MW content, such as temporal orientation and emotional valence, and that MW is either disruptive or beneficial to an individual’s health and well-being depending on its content [30]. Past orientation has been shown to follow negative affect [13], and future orientation is primarily regarded as reflecting on the utility of future planning [21] and may allow the refinement of personal goals [22]. Negative valence is associated with lower performance in working memory and sustained attention tasks compared with neutral or positive valence [31]. Moreover, research has partly shown that the combined effects of temporal orientation and emotional valence of MW may have different clinical implications. For example, past-oriented and negatively valanced thought is a form of state-level rumination that may have a dysfunctional aspect as a form of negative self-referential processing [13, 14]. In contrast, future-oriented and positive valence is a form of creative thinking and planning for the future, which may have a potential functional aspect, such as creative problem-solving and autobiographical planning [21, 27, 29, 32].
In addition, researchers have argued for the importance of distinguishing intentional and unintentional MW [33–40]. Intentional MW has been positively associated with creative task performance and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire’s subscale ‘Nonreactivity to internal experiences’, while unintentional MW has been negatively associated with them [26, 36]. Neuroimaging studies have shown that the default mode network and the frontal-parietal network have more functional connectivity with higher intentional MW traits than with unintentional MW traits [41]. Unintentional MW traits were positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress, whereas intentional MW traits were negatively associated (albeit very weakly) with stress and anxiety and were unrelated to depression [42]. Unintentional MW is also associated with fidgeting [33], attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms [43], and obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms [44]. Intentional MW has been shown to occur more frequently in easy tasks and unintentional MW in difficult tasks [39]; additionally, intentional MW has been shown to be more future-oriented and less vague in content [45]. Thus, intentional and unintentional MW have functionally different properties and differ in their content dimensions.
We assume that the critical factors affecting the two opposed aspects of the functioning of MW would be their intentionality and content dimensions. However, the relationship of intentionality with the content dimensions has not been examined, apart from the few exceptions mentioned above [45]. In particular, the relation to the combination of different content dimensions of temporal orientation and emotional valence has never been examined. The present research question is ‘What kind of content does intentional or unintentional MW produce?’ The current study aims to examine whether intentional and unintentional MW differ in the frequency of the content related to temporal orientation, emotional valence, and their combinations. For this purpose, we used the sequential Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) [39], a sustained attention task in which target stimuli are presented sequentially and are likely to be predictable for participants, and both intentional and unintentional MW are most likely to be induced. We assessed both kinds of MW using experience sampling with intermittent thought probes and tested the following hypotheses:
(1) Compared with intentional MW, unintentional MW is more likely to generate negative and past-oriented content and less likely to generate positive and future content.
(2) If we combine the content dimensions of temporal orientation and emotional valence, more specific relationships with intentionality are revealed.
The most common definitions of MW include task-unrelated thinking, unintentional thinking, stimulus-independent thinking, stimulus-independent task-unrelated thinking, and tortuous unguided thinking [7]. Based on the operational definition of MW as task-unrelated thoughts and for the measurement and description of the intentionality of MW, we defined MW as the self-report of thoughts unrelated to an experimental task required for participants [39, 45, 46]. Here, self-reports of thoughts unrelated to the experimental task that were generated intentionally by the participants were defined as intentional MW, while self-reports of thoughts unrelated to the experimental task that were generated unintentionally by the participants were defined as unintentional MW.
2.1. Participants
Data from 30 participants were analyzed (11 males and 19 females; mean age: 23.5 ± 4.5). Thirty-one undergraduate students from Waseda University in Japan participated for 1,500 Japanese yen each. Data from one participant were removed from all subsequent analyses because of the participant’s operating errors during task execution. All experimental protocols were approved by the Ethics Committee for Research on Human Subjects, Waseda University (Approval No. 2017 − 113). We confirmed that all participants provided written informed consent. We also confirmed that all methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.
2.2. The Sequential Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART)
The sequential SART was programmed using PsychoPy2, adapted from Seli et al. [39] and Arabaci and Parris [46]. On each trial, digits 1‒9 were first presented in white in the centre of the black screen for 250 ms, and then an “x” mask was presented for 900 ms (total trial duration = 1150 ms). On each block, the digits were presented in sequential order (1 through 9, repeated in each block) and five possible font sizes (120, 100, 94, 72, and 48 points). In every nine trials (1 block), four font sizes were randomly determined to appear twice, and one to appear once. The digits were set with Courier New typeface. The participants were required to press a space key for each digit, excepting 3, and to withhold responses to the digit 3. After 18 practice trials (2 blocks), participants completed 900 trials in total (100 blocks).
2.3. Thought probes
We assessed properties of MW using intermittent thought probes. To ensure that the thought probe was provided after several trials, the experimental trials began with 18 trials (2 blocks) with no thought probe presented. A thought probe was randomly presented 20 times during the 2nd–98th blocks. In addition, if a probe was presented during the same block, no more probes were presented in the same block. When a probe occurred, the task stopped, and the participant was presented with the following question in Japanese: ‘Q1: Which of the following responses best characterizes your mental state just prior to the presentation of this screen?’ The possible response options were ‘(1) On task’, ‘(2) Intentional MW’, and ‘(3) Unintentional MW’ [39, 45, 46]. Participants were instructed to respond via a key press (1–3). After providing a response to the thought probe, participants were presented with the following question in Japanese: ‘Q2: Which of the following responses best characterizes your mental state just prior to the presentation of this screen, in terms of whether the content was related to the past or to the future?’ The possible response options were ‘(1) My thoughts involved future events’, and ‘(2) My thoughts involved past events’. Participants were instructed to respond via a key press for future or past-oriented content (1–2) or to press the space key for being on task. After providing a response to Q2, participants were presented with the following question in Japanese: ‘Q3: Which of the following responses best characterizes your mental state just prior to the presentation of this screen, in terms of whether the content was positive, neutral, or negative?’ The possible response options were ‘(1) The content of my thoughts was positive’, ‘(2) The content of my thoughts was neutral’, and ‘(3) The content of my thoughts was negative’. Participants were instructed to respond via a key press (1–3) or to press the space key for being on task. Following 18 practice trials, participants completed 900 experimental trials with 20 thought probes. To eliminate the potential for response bias, these questions were presented to participants regardless of whether they responded that they were ‘on task’ in Q1 (According to Seli et al.[39, 45] and Arabacı and Parris [46], if participants were not required to press a response button for the questions Q2 and Q3 after responding with an ‘on task’ response, they might have had a response bias to select the ‘on task’ response for minimal effort to accelerate the task, even if they were not actually on task).
2.4 Procedure
After obtaining informed consent, the participants were briefed to familiarise them with the requirements of the SART. Before starting the experiment, participants were also given detailed instructions on thought-probe responses (instructions were prepared in Japanese with reference to Seli et al.[39]). For participants, ‘on task’ meant that they were either not thinking or thinking about something related to the task (e.g. thinking about their performance, thinking about numbers, thinking about their reactions), and ‘MW’ meant that they were thinking about something completely unrelated to the task (e.g. thinking about what to have for dinner, plans with friends, an upcoming test). Further, participants were asked to indicate whether the MW was intentional (deliberate) or unintentional (spontaneous). After providing a response to Q1, participants were presented with two questions that asked about the thought content they had just prior to the thought-probe presentation. Task performance includes the percentage of accurate responses to target trials and the response time (in ms) for target trials. In addition, the frequency of MW was measured for each participant by counting the numbers of thought probes to which the participant reported each type of MW.
2.5 Data analysis
First, we presented the descriptive statistics for the sequential SART performance measures.
Next, we examined differences in the temporal orientation and emotional valence of MW with and without intention. Since there were two levels of within-subject and between-subject variability in all variables, multi-level logistic regression analyses were conducted with the intentionality of MW as the independent variable and the temporal orientation and emotional valence of MW and their combination as the dependent variables. Statistical analysis software R (ver. 3.3.2) was used for the analyses. The odds ratios of intentional MW and unintentional MW (intentional = 0, unintentional = 1) were obtained when each of the MW variables (temporal orientation, emotional valence, and their combination) was set to 1, and otherwise set to 0 (for example, when a negative past-oriented variable was set to 1, other variables were set to 0). We conducted 20 thought samplings for each subject (30 participants), excluded data that focused on the task, and obtained data (n = 334) that indicated that the subjects showed intentional or unintentional MW, which were then used for the analysis.
On average, participants took 246.80 ms (SD = 74.17) to respond to Go-trials and they provided No-go errors to 21.10% (SD = 10.97) of these trials. Table 1 shows the frequency and percentage of each content dimension for intentional and unintentional MW.
Next, we examined differences in temporal orientation, emotional valence, and their combination between intentional and unintentional MW. Table 2 shows differences between intentional and unintentional MW indicated by the odds ratio of each content dimension as estimated with multi-level logistic regression.
3.1 Temporal orientation
Since there are only two types of temporal orientation (past-oriented or future-oriented) and the odds ratios are opposite, we report the results for one of them (future-oriented = 1, past-oriented = 0). For future-oriented orientation, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 0.41 (p = .002, 95% CI [0.23, 0.73]). An odds ratio less than 1 indicates that intentional MW is more likely to have that kind of content, and a value greater than 1 indicates that unintentional MW is more likely to have that kind of content.
3.2 Emotional valence
For positive valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 0.53 with marginal significance (p = .056, 95% CI [0.27,1.02]). For neutral valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 1.82 (p = .042, 95% CI [1.02,3.24]). No significant difference was found between intentional and unintentional MW for negative valence.
3.3 The combination of temporal orientation and emotional valence
For past-oriented and neutral valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 1.94 (p = .034, 95% CI [1.05,3.59]). For past-oriented and negative valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 4.88 (p = .039, 95% CI [1.08,21.94]). For future-oriented and positive valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 0.46 (p = .037, 95% CI [0.22,0.95]). For future-oriented and negative valence, the odds ratio for unintentional MW was 0.38 (p = .018, 95% CI [0.17,0.85]). No significant difference was found between intentional and unintentional MW for content with past-oriented and positive valence or future-oriented and neutral valence.
Researchers have highlighted the importance of distinguishing intentionality, which affects differential functioning of MW, and the content regulation hypothesis, which proposes the importance of content in assessing clinical costs and benefits of MW [30, 40]. Although the frequency of each content dimension differed depending on the intentionality of MW [45], whether various combinations of temporal orientation and emotional valence also differ according to the intentionality should be examined, which is crucial in distinguishing the clinical costs and benefits of MW. Thus, the present study aimed to clarify whether intentional and unintentional MW differ in the frequency of content related to temporal orientation, emotional valence, and their combination. We found that the intentionality of MW makes a huge difference in the combination of temporal orientation and emotional valence. Compared with intentional MW, unintentional MW was most likely to generate negative past-oriented content and then neutral past-oriented content and less likely to generate positive and negative future-oriented content.
The first hypothesis was supported by the result that unintentional MW was 0.41 times more likely to generate future content (i.e. intentional MW was 2.43 times more likely) (p = .002) and 0.53 times more likely to generate marginally positive content (i.e. intentional MW was 1.89 times more likely) (p = .056). However, unintentional MW was not likely to generate negative content and 1.82 times more likely to generate neutral content (p = .042), contrary to our expectations. A previous study using a choice reaction time task [45] found that, compared with intentional MW, unintentional MW is more likely to generate past-oriented content, which was replicated in this study with Asian participants using the sequential SART with a multi-level analysis method. However, the results of the previous study [45], in which there were no significant differences in the self-rating of emotional valence using a response scale (negative for 0 and positive for 100), were different from the present study’s self-rating of emotional valence using the triple forced choice method (negative or neutral or positive). Therefore, the absence of significant results from the previous study [45] might have been due to the difference in the response scale of emotional valence cancelling out the difference between positive and negative valence, and the significant difference in neutral valence may have been uniquely found in this study because of the choice method that includes a neutral response.
The second hypothesis was supported by the result that there were significant differences in the combination of negative valence and past orientation (OR = 4.88, p = .039) and negative valence and future orientation (OR = .38, p = .018), although there was no significant difference in the independent dimension of negative valence (OR = .85, p = .652), depending on the intentionality of MW. These results suggest that the combined content dimensions may have different content-specific effects depending on whether MW is intentional or unintentional. In addition, unintentional MW was 0.46 times more likely to generate positive future content (i.e. intentional MW was 2.17 times more likely) (p = .037). In prior research, suicidality was associated with the absence of positive future thinking, not with having negative future thinking [47–49]. Moreover, college students with high depressive symptoms [50], and depressed patients [51–54] showed a decrease in positive future thinking compared with a control group. In other research, it was found that more perseverative or ruminative (i.e. negative past-oriented) types of unintentional MW tend to be associated with depression and anxiety [55]. Therefore, compared with intentional MW, unintentional MW may have clinical costs by promoting the generation of negative past-oriented thoughts and inhibiting the generation of positive future-oriented thoughts.
As mentioned above, unintentional MW was not only 0.46 times more likely to generate positive future-oriented content than intentional MW (i.e. intentional MW was 2.17 times more likely), but also 0.38 times more likely to generate negative future-oriented content (i.e. intentional MW was 2.61 times more likely), contrary to our expectation. From this finding, whether intentional MW is more likely to generate functional content should be carefully considered. Since intentional MW is more likely to generate negative future-oriented content, it may be related to the dysfunctionality of worrying about the future. However, our results suggested that intentional MW is more likely to generate both positive and negative future-oriented content compared with unintentional MW. According to previous studies, future-oriented thoughts are rated as having more positivity bias than past-oriented thoughts in the lab and in daily life [56–59]. Rather than thinking about future events in an entirely positive or negative way and being swept away by these thoughts, strategically allowing ambivalence to emerge is a way to protect oneself from having unpleasant emotions in the event of failure [60]. Therefore, intentional MW may be more functional than unintentional MW, such as strategically simulating future events and thus involving negative emotions to avoid and prevent the risk for negative outcomes by regulating the balance of emotional valence in future-oriented content. Future research should examine the relationship between intentional MW with negative future-oriented content and the trait of worry. The second surprising finding is that unintentional MW was 1.94 times more likely than intentional MW to generate neutral past content. Since unintentional MW is more likely to generate independent dimensions of past-oriented and neutral content, it may also generate a combination of neutral and past-oriented content.
In conclusion, we found that the combined dimensions of content may have different content-specific effects depending on intentional and unintentional MW. Our findings suggest that intentional and unintentional MW did not differ in the frequency of negative valence, whereas a difference in the frequency of combined negative valence and temporal orientation was observed. Here, we would claim that the intentionality and combination of content dimensions of MW should be considered before drawing general conclusions about the factors that constrain the costs and benefits of MW. However, since the present results were obtained in the laboratory using an attention task with a significantly lower cognitive load [39], which is most likely to induce both intentional and unintentional MW, the generalizability of the findings should be examined using various other conditions. According to recent studies, the intentionality of MW may differ depending on differences in individual traits and task manipulation 38–41, 46]. Future research should examine the relationship of intentionality with various combinations of content dimensions in different context conditions, such as individual traits, inter-individual variability in daily life, and manipulation of cognitive tasks in the laboratory.
Data availability statement (mandatory)
The dataset analysed during the current study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgements (optional)
We are grateful to all the participants in this study from Waseda University in Japan. This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (Grant Number: 20J23096).
Author contributions (names must be given as initials)
All the authors collaborated to design the study. S.G. programmed the computer task, data collection and analysis of data. All the authors interpreted the results. S.G. drafted the manuscript. All other authors have provided critical revisions. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Additional Information (including a Competing Interests Statement)
The authors declare no competing interests.
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Table 1. Frequency and percent of intentional MW and unintentional MW with each content
|
MW content |
Intentional MW（N=95） |
Unintentional MW (N=239) |
Total (N=334) |
|||
|
N |
％ |
N |
％ |
N |
％ |
|
|
Past |
31 |
33 |
121 |
51 |
152 |
46 |
|
Future |
64 |
67 |
118 |
49 |
182 |
54 |
|
Positive |
28 |
29 |
46 |
19 |
74 |
22 |
|
Neutral |
49 |
52 |
151 |
63 |
200 |
60 |
|
Negative |
18 |
19 |
42 |
18 |
60 |
18 |
|
Positive past |
7 |
7 |
14 |
6 |
21 |
6 |
|
Neutral past |
22 |
23 |
82 |
34 |
104 |
31 |
|
Negative past |
2 |
2 |
25 |
10 |
27 |
8 |
|
Future orientation and positive valence |
21 |
22 |
32 |
13 |
53 |
16 |
|
Future orientation and neutral valence |
27 |
28 |
69 |
29 |
96 |
29 |
|
Future orientation and negative valence |
16 |
17 |
17 |
7 |
33 |
10 |
No competing interests reported.