On the relationship between unprompted thought and affective well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a growing recognition that thoughts often arise independently of external demands. These thoughts can span from reminiscing your last vacation to contemplating career goals to fantasizing about meeting your favorite musician. Often referred to as mind wandering, such frequently occurring unprompted thoughts have widespread impact on our daily functions, with the dominant narrative converging on a negative relationship between unprompted thought and affective well-being. In this systematic review of 76 studies, we implemented a meta-analysis and qualitative review to elucidate if and when unprompted thought is indeed negatively associated with affective well-being in adults. Using a multilevel mixed-model approach on 386 effect sizes from 23,168 participants across 64 studies, our meta-analyses indicated an overall relationship between unprompted thought and worse affective well-being (r¯ = -.18, 95% CI [-.23, -.14]); however, the magnitude and direction of this relationship changed when considering specific aspects of the phenomenon (including thought content and intentionality) and methodological approaches (including questionnaires vs. experience sampling). The qualitative review further contextualizes this relationship by revealing the nuances of how and when unprompted thought is associated with affective well-being. Taken together, our meta-analysis and qualitative review indicate that the commonly reported relationship between unprompted thought and affective well-being is contingent upon the content and conceptualization of unprompted thought, as well as the methodological and analytic approaches implemented. Based on these findings, we propose emerging directions for future empirical and theoretical work that highlight the importance of accounting for when, how, and for whom unprompted thought is associated with affective well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it