Does Mood Change During a Mind-Wandering Task?

Abstract Purpose People in a negative, compared to a positive, mood report they mind-wander more often. This pattern is demonstrated in-lab by inducing participants into a mood state (e.g., positive or negative), then assessing their mind-wandering as they complete a low-demand, repetitive task, such as the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; Robertson et al. in Neuropsychologia 35:747–758, 1997), used in mind-wandering research. Although inductions successfully alter participants’ mood, we do not know whether the induced mood weakens during the task, confounding our understanding of the mood and mind-wandering relationship. Method: To investigate, we ran two studies. Study 1: Participants were induced into a mood state (positive, negative, neutral), then completed two 5-min SART blocks. We measured positive and negative affect pre- and post-induction, and after each SART block. Study 2: We replicated Study 1, excluding the mood induction. Results: In Study 1, during the SART, participants’ positive affect decreased in the positive and neutral mood conditions; negative affect decreased in the negative mood condition. In other words, participants’ induced mood weakened during the SART. In Study 2, participants’ negative affect increased, and positive affect decreased during the SART. Further, decreased positive affect during the first SART block occurred alongside increased mind-wandering (target-errors) in the first, and the second, SART blocks. Conclusions: Participants’ induced mood weakened during the SART—positive mood became less positive while negative mood became less negative. Future research comparing the SART with an alternative task may be necessary to understand how task selection influences mood during mind-wandering assessments.