Abstract
Research has shown that mind-wandering, negative mood, and poor wellbeing are closely related, stressing the importance of exploring contexts or tools that can stimulate positive thoughts and images. While music represents a promising option, work on this topic is still scarce with only a few studies published, mainly featuring laboratory or online music listening tasks. Here, I used the experience sampling method for the first time to capture mind-wandering during personal music listening in everyday life, aiming to test for the capacity of music to facilitate beneficial styles of mind-wandering and to explore its experiential characteristics. Twenty-six participants used a smart-phone application that collected reports of thought, mood, and emotion during music listening or other daily-life activities over 10 days. The application was linked to a music playlist, specifically assembled to induce positive and relaxing emotions. Results showed that mind-wandering evoked during music and non-music contexts had overall similar characteristics, although some minor differences were also observed. Most importantly, music-evoked emotions predicted thought valence, thereby indicating music as an effective tool to regulate thoughts via emotion. These findings have important applications for music listening in daily life as well as for the use of music in health interventions.
Highlights
Music’s capability to influence ongoing conscious thought has not been systematically explored yet
The purpose of this study was to explore the prevalence and main characteristics of mind-wandering evoked during personal music listening in daily life and, in particular, its relationship with the emotions evoked by music
The difference in response-rates between music experience sample reports (M-ESRs) and non-music experience sample reports (NM-ESRs) is probably due to the fact that the music M-ESRs required more time commitment and attention from the participants compared with NM-ESRs, mostly due to the music listening “task”
Summary
Music’s capability to influence ongoing conscious thought has not been systematically explored yet. Mind-wandering is an omnipresent mental phenomenon consisting of a shift of attention away from the external world or an ongoing activity to an internally-oriented dynamic flow of thoughts and/or images. Such thoughts can vary in their degree of intentionality (with mind-wandering being deliberate or spontaneous), meta-awareness (being aware of our mind-wandering), task-relatedness (the degree to which mind-wandering can be associated with the task at hand, if there is any), their modality (the form in which mind-wandering occurs, for instance, images, thoughts, or sounds), and, phenomenological content (for example, one can think about the future, self-relevant matters, other people, etc.) [4,5,6]. We know that humans can mind wander up to 50% of their waking time
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