Abstract
Experience and thoughts that are unrelated to the external surroundings are pervasive features of human cognition. Research under the rubric of mind-wandering suggests that such internal experience is context-dependent, and that the content of ongoing thought differentially influences a range of associated outcomes. However, evidence on how the extent of mind-wandering and its content translate from the laboratory to daily life settings is scarce. Furthermore, the relationship between such patterns of thought with markers of stress in daily life remains underexplored. In the current study, we examined multiple aspects of mind-wandering of ninety-three healthy participants (47 women, 25.4 ± 3.9 years) in both the laboratory and daily life and explored two questions: (a) how are mind-wandering extent and content correlated across both settings, and (b) what are their relationships with subjective stress and salivary cortisol levels in daily life? Our results suggest that the extent of off-task thinking is not correlated across contexts, while features of content—i.e., social, future-directed and negative thought content—robustly translate. We also found that daily life subjective stress was linked to more on-task, negative, and future-directed thinking, suggesting stress was linked with the need to act on personally relevant goals. Based on these results we speculate that differences in the links between stress and ongoing thought in daily life may be one reason why patterns of thinking vary from lab to everyday life. More generally, these findings underline the need to consider both context and content in investigating mind-wandering and associated features of subjective experience, and call for caution in generalizing laboratory findings to participants’ daily lives.
Highlights
Disengaging from external stimulation and letting the mind wander from the here-and-now is a common phenomenon in everyday life
We aimed to compare the amount of off-task thinking in the laboratory and daily life based on the notion that the extent of mind-wandering is dependent on the demands of a given context (Kane et al, 2007), and recent evidence challenging the assumption of a consistent association between contexts (Kane et al, 2017)
Our study provides evidence on (1) how different aspects of ongoing thought differentially translate from the laboratory to daily life and (2) how both subjective stress as well as associated levels of the HPA axis end hormone cortisol relate to thought content and other subjective experiences such as affect and arousal in everyday life
Summary
Disengaging from external stimulation and letting the mind wander from the here-and-now is a common phenomenon in everyday life. The differentiation of mind-wandering qualities such as content and form (Smallwood et al, 2016), and the exploration of specific contexts in which self-generated, task-unrelated thoughts occur, are argued to be important avenues to advance our understanding of the costs and benefits of different aspects of experience (Smallwood & Andrews-Hanna, 2013; Wang et al, 2017). Researchers often exploit the ability to constrain task context to either induce mind-wandering (typically by keeping cognitive demands low; Smallwood, Nind, & O’Connor, 2009) or to detect the consequences of off-task thought using tasks which demand continuous external attention (e.g., McVay & Kane, 2009), or both (Turnbull et al, 2019). Daily life situations present us with more complex ecological contexts which may be less readily comparable to
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