The Study Of The Relationship Between Mind-wandering And Negative Emotion

The relationship between emotion and cognition is always the interest of mainstream psychology, and MW seems as the area in which emotion and cognition could overlap and show their joint contribution to it in daily life(Smallwood, Fitzgerald et al.,2009). We define mind-wandering as the involuntary conscious experience which comes from the internal mental processes and is not related directly to the immediate environment. The researches of the relationship between mind-wandering and emotion give us a better understanding of how emotion affects such involuntary conscious experience and a new direction of the therapy of emotion disorders and cognitive impairment. Now we still lack the conclusion about whether negative mood could enhance mind-wandering and mind-wandering could affect the mood. Based on such two problems, we did three studies of the relationship between emotion and mind-wandering in the lab and daily life, according to that negative mood could affect mind-wandering and mind-wandering could affect emotion..It includes three researches:Research 1 take ESM (experience sampling method) which has more ecological validity to study the relationship between negative mood, personality and the frequency and characteristics of mind-wandering. Research 2 explore the effect of the frequency and characteristics of mind-wandering from real pressure and induced emotion.Research 3 explore the effect of mind-wandering on induced negative emotion which is measured by physiological data.Research 1 takes ESM (experience sampling method) to study the relationship between negative mood and mind-wandering in the daily life, Research 2 investigate the effect of pressure and induced emotion on mind-wandering in laboratory, Research 3 explore the effect of mind-wandring on induced negative emotion. We concluded that 1) Negative mood could enhance the likelihood of MW in daily life, including anxiety and depression. And the frequency of mind-wandering is positively correlated to the score of neuroticism;2) MW happened more frequently when participants are in the pressure.Pressure and induced emotion had a significant interaction effect on the past-oriented episodic MW. Compared with normal participants, participants in pressure experienced more past-oriented episodic MW, but which happened on the individuals in the neutral emotion group only; 3) MW could modify the induced negative mood, higher MW trait of participants and more frequent MW happened in the tasks predicted more improvement on negative mood.