ArticlePsychological research2022
Individual differences in dimensions of mind wandering: the mediating role of emotional valence and intentionality.
Article in Psychological research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Effects of emotional valence of mind wandering on sustained attention performance.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Multimodal Physiological Assessment of Attentional States and Driving Styles in Simulated Driving.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Are the correlates of mind wandering consistent across younger and older adults?Psychological research · 2026Article
- Not all task-unrelated thoughts (TUT) are created equal - TUT characteristics as predictors of affective states and heart-rate variability.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Can participants authoritatively report on the emotional valence of their mind wandering?Cognition & emotion · 2026Article
- Building a construct-valid battery of performance and self-report indicators of sustained attention consistency.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Further unpacking age-related differences in mind wandering: The roles of emotional valence and meta-awareness.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Mind-wandering in daily life in depressed individuals: An experience sampling study.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Protocol and preregistration for the CODEC project: measuring, modelling and mechanistically understanding the nature of cognitive variability in early childhood.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Further unpacking individual differences in mind wandering: The role of emotional valence and awareness.Consciousness and cognition · 2024Article
- Elucidating the difference between mind-wandering and day-dreaming terms.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Exploring the optimal factor structure of mind-wandering: Associations with neuroticism.PloS one · 2024Article
- Age-Related Differences in Mind Wandering: The Role of Emotional Valence.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- The contribution of latent factors of executive functioning to mind wandering: an experience sampling study.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Individual differences in executive control ability reliably show that those with greater executive control report fewer instances of mind wandering during moderately demanding tasks. However, these findings have been limited in that they often treated mind wandering as a variable that collapsed across a variety of thought categories or dimensions. We suggest that two dimensions of mind wandering, intentionality and emotional valence, may be differential related to individual difference in executive control ability. The present study examined this using multiple measures of working memory capacity and attentional control while measuring emotional valence and intentionality of mind wandering during a single sustained attention task. Non-cognitive predictors of mind wandering were also measured. Overall, the results suggest that both working memory capacity and attention control are significant predictors of mind wandering propensity, replicating previous findings. However, the dimensions of emotional valence and intentionality suggested that this finding was not consistent across all types of thought reports. The current findings provide support for the view that it is critical to consider these two dimensions, among other important dimensions, of mind wandering to have a more complete understanding of individual differences in mind wandering.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.