"A Wandering Mind Is An Unhappy Mind", Killingsworth & Gilbert 2010

[Gwern Branwen]

"A Wandering Mind Is An Unhappy Mind", Killingsworth & Gilbert 2010
http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2010/killingsworth2010a.pdf

> ...Unfortunately, collecting real-time reports from large numbers of people as they go about their daily lives is so cumbersome and expensive that experience sampling has rarely been used to investigate the relationship between mind wandering and happiness and has always been limited to very small samples (8, 9). We solved this problem by developing a Web application for the iPhone (Apple Incorporated, Cupertino, California), which we used to create an unusually large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities. The application contacts participants through their iPhones at random moments during their waking hours, presents them with questions, and records their answers to a database at http://www.trackyourhappiness.org . The database currently contains nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5000 people from 83 different countries who range in age from 18 to 88 and who collectively represent every one of 86 major occupational categories.
>
> ...randomly assigned to answer a happiness question (“How are you feeling right now?”) answered on a continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100), an activity question (“What are you doing right now?”) answered by endorsing one or more of 22 activities adapted from the day reconstruction method (10, 11), and a mind-wandering question (“Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?”) answered with one of four options: no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; or yes, something unpleasant.
>
> 1. ...people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing. Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the samples taken during every activity except making love...the nature of people’s activities had only a modest impact on whether their minds wandered and had almost no impact on the pleasantness
> 2. ...regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b) = –8.79, P < 0.001], and this was true during all activities ...Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).
> 3. ...what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing. The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness.

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

[Aman Idle]

damn that's me in a nutshell. My mind wanders all the time. So i day dream a lot. However apparently day dreaming is good for memory according to a a show I saw recently.

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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[Jonathan Toomim]

Post-hoc ergo propter hoc? Bah. Just because the mind wandering came
first doesn't mean it was the cause. For example, people's awareness of
their mood and happiness may (and is likely to) lag behind their actual
mood and happiness. When asked how they're feeling, they will tend to
integrate the memories of their feelings over some time period in the
past; that time period may be longer than the subjects are aware of.
Also, pleiotropic causation is possible: perhaps people's minds tend to
wander when they encounter an obstacle that they don't immediately know
how to overcome, and persistent failure to overcome the obstacles they
face causes them to be unhappy.

When will social scientists learn that large sample sizes and
sophisticated statistical methods are neither replacements for nor
excuses for the lack of actual experimentation? Sigh.

Jonathan

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Jonathan Toomim <jto...@jtoomim.org> wrote:
> Post-hoc ergo propter hoc? Bah. Just because the mind wandering came first
> doesn't mean it was the cause.

No, but it does exclude many of the possible correlations (like the
obvious one that becoming unhappy with what one is doing then prompts
mind-wandering/fantasizing), and so constitutes evidence for the
suggest causal link.

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

[T. Lavon Lawrence]

That a wandering mind causes unhappiness has been taught in esoteric circles for centuries, and this study merely confirms it.

The wandering itself is 'cause' "because" the lack of conscious control in that moment allows Attention to become caught up in negative thoughts and their attached emotional states.

If such mental states do not capture Attention, then there is a "disinterested observer" effect that prevents misery in the present moment.

Attention Training (and those disciplines that involve it) carries the benefit for the trainee of learning this fact and provides them an avenue for present moment rescue from otherwise unhappy mental states that are otherwise brought on by generally unwanted, undisciplined, and persistent impractical mental chatter filled with negative content (daydreaming content that often starts out pleasantly enough but ends with the mind being involuntarily drawn to problem thoughts).

The thought-based mental states are the actual source of the unhappiness while the failure to consciously and willfully control Attention (mind wandering) is the cause.

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T. Lavon Lawrence
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[Michael]

Mind wandering is not a precursor to unhappiness, although I do believe there is some value in the argument that there is an indirect relationship. However, this is just dependent on how an individual generally processes information and whether they employ ruminative or more positive reflective mental habits. It's pretty simple, if they are more ruminative then mind wandering may compound the negative effects and thus lead to greater unhappiness, hence the established indirect connection, however, if they are more conscientious reflective thinkers then mind wandering is unlikely to reveal any such negative relationship. Instead, it may actually give rise to other, more positive relationships, such as the relationship between mind wandering and creativity. 

"So, why did the house fall down?" Jim says

"Because you tried to renovate it and you screwed up." Says Tom, the social scientist wannabe, who sometimes, due to his quick and decisive but mostly inaccurate judgments forms the wrong impression about some things.

"No, it's because the house was infested with termites, and so, when you tried to make changes according to what you thought the structural integrity of the house was, it collapsed in on you because its integrity was at a much lower standard than your realistic (no one knew it was infested with termites, or rather,__ruminative mental habits___) expectations." Says Harry.

On Friday, April 6, 2012 10:16:36 AM UTC+10, T. Lavon Lawrence wrote:

That a wandering mind causes unhappiness has been taught in esoteric circles for centuries, and this study merely confirms it.

The wandering itself is 'cause' "because" the lack of conscious control in that moment allows Attention to become caught up in negative thoughts and their attached emotional states.

If such mental states do not capture Attention, then there is a "disinterested observer" effect that prevents misery in the present moment.

Attention Training (and those disciplines that involve it) carries the benefit for the trainee of learning this fact and provides them an avenue for present moment rescue from otherwise unhappy mental states that are otherwise brought on by generally unwanted, undisciplined, and persistent impractical mental chatter filled with negative content (daydreaming content that often starts out pleasantly enough but ends with the mind being involuntarily drawn to problem thoughts).

The thought-based mental states are the actual source of the unhappiness while the failure to consciously and willfully control Attention (mind wandering) is the cause.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Jonathan Toomim <jto...@jtoomim.org> wrote:
> Post-hoc ergo propter hoc? Bah. Just because the mind wandering came first
> doesn't mean it was the cause.

No, but it does exclude many of the possible correlations (like the
obvious one that becoming unhappy with what one is doing then prompts
mind-wandering/fantasizing), and so constitutes evidence for the
suggest causal link.

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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[polar]

Altough correlation doesnt equal causation, it often reveals bi-directional relationship. I think with this, very strong correlation, it is the case. Btw it sounds more plausible when you rephrase it - "staying in the present makes people happier". And it definitely is a neccessary (altough not sufficient) condition of being in the "flow".

Dne úterý, 3. dubna 2012 19:24:15 UTC+2 gwern napsal(a):