The Relationship Between Mood And Mind-Wandering

Mind-wandering refers to the state that the attention is defocused from present task and attracted by the internal information, it suggests that our minds not only response to the external environment but also our internal information. During mind-wandering, the individuals think about their past, present and future, and resolve the conflicts about themselves. That function of mind-wandering was embodied in its’relationship with emotion.There have been many studies about the association between emotion and mind-wandering, but they did not indicate the differences in one’s emotional trait and emotional state. Emotion trait is stable while the emotional state is tentative, so they are different. In the present research we studied the relationship between mind-wandering not only with depressed emotional traits but also with depressed emotional state, and investigated the effect of depressed emotion on the frequency and the content of mind-wandering, and in turn, we explored the function on emotion regulation of mind-wandering.The study contained two experiments. Experiment1studied the differences in the frequency and content of mind-wandering after mood induction in both SART and resting-state. Experiment2chose depressed people by questionnaire and controlled the rate of mind-wandering by different cognitive load. The results showed that:1) Depressed people reported more mind-wandering, and their content of mind-wandering was more past-oriented and negative;2) For the happy people, their past-oriented and negative mind wandering increased after negative mood induction, and more mind-wandering would help to decrease their negative mood.3) For the depressed people, more mind-wandering would make them more depressed; 4) The results indicated that emotional trait and emotional state affect mind-wandering in different ways:for depressed people, mind-wandering may come from their low WMC, while for happy ones, mind-wandering may have adaptive functions.