Cognitive Therapy and Research

Nayda, Diane M.; Takarangi, Melanie K.T.

doi: 10.1007/s10608-025-10626-wpmid: N/A

PurposePeople 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.

Bagheri, Mahdi; Woud, Marcella L.; Feller, Anna-Lena; Laudi, Janine; Kirchner, Gabriel D.; Schneider, Henriette; Margraf, Jürgen; Blackwell, Simon E.

doi: 10.1007/s10608-025-10625-xpmid: N/A

BackgroundInvoluntary memories are common in daily life and thought to play important functional roles, for example in prompting behaviour. People can experience involuntary memories not only of events they have actually experienced, but also of scenarios they have only imagined. However, this latter phenomenon, and the factors influencing its occurrence, are relatively unexplored. The current study aimed to investigate whether the vividness of an imagined scenario affects the likelihood of involuntary recall.MethodsUniversity students (N = 80) listened to descriptions of positive scenarios and imagined them, with half the sample randomly allocated to hearing extended versions of the scenarios hypothesised to induce more vivid imagery. Participants then recorded involuntary memories of the imagined scenarios in a three-day diary before returning to the lab.ResultsThere was no effect of the experimental manipulation on vividness of the imagined scenarios or on the number of involuntary memories. However, participants who generated more vivid imagery of the scenarios recorded more involuntary memories. Exploratory analyses revealed further predictors of the quantity of involuntary memories experienced.ConclusionsThe results further our understanding of factors that may affect the likelihood of involuntary retrieval of previously-generated positive imagery, with both theoretical and potential clinical implications.