A wandering (older) mind is a happy mind: Age moderates the combined effects of mind wandering and executive function on momentary affective state.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growing evidence suggests that healthy aging is reliably associated with a positivity bias, benefiting affective well-being in older age. The socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that the positivity bias is subserved by top-down attentional processes, whereas the dynamic integration theory suggests it is subserved by bottom-up attentional processes. However, little is known about whether the age-related positivity bias manifests to the same extent in individuals with lower levels of executive function, such as those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. It is also unclear whether the positivity bias is observed in naturalistic contexts and specifically how momentary attentional states in daily life, such as on-task attention, or mind wandering (intentionally or unintentionally), may moderate the positivity bias. To address these questions, we recruited 101 adults (aged 19-79) with self-reported attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and probed their momentary attentional and affective states during everyday life, six times daily for 7 days. Using attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptom levels as an index of executive dysfunction, we examined the interaction between age, executive function, and momentary attentional state in predicting momentary affective valence. Results indicate that older adults showed a more positive relationship between executive dysfunction and affective valence during unintentional mind wandering (compared with on-task attention), whereas younger adults exhibited the opposite pattern. Our findings provide preferential support for the dynamic integration theory rather than the socioemotional selectivity theory account of the positivity bias and highlight the moderating effect of age on a complex relationship between executive dysfunction, momentary attentional state, and affective valence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".