Off-task thinking among adults with and without social anxiety disorder: an ecological momentary assessment study

ABSTRACT

Although task-unrelated thinking (often conceptualised as “mind-wandering”) has been increasingly investigated in recent years, the content and correlates of everyday off-task thought in clinical disorders, particularly anxiety disorders, remain poorly understood. We aimed to address this gap by using ecological momentary assessment to assess off-task and on-task thoughts in adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and demographically matched controls. Findings showed that individuals with SAD more frequently engaged in internally oriented off-task thinking than healthy controls, but not externally oriented off-task thinking. Compared to thoughts focused on the task at hand, adults with SAD rated their internal off-task thoughts as less controllable, more self-focused, and as associated with worse mood than controls. However, when the SAD group was focused on the task at hand, group differences disappeared. Daily findings were paralleled by higher scores in SAD on a trait measure of unintentional, but not intentional, mind-wandering. In sum, the content and mood correlate of internally oriented off-task thoughts depended on the presence of clinical anxiety. In addition, focusing on the task at hand normalised thought content and mood in SAD, highlighting a window for intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Mind-wandering
• anxiety
• social anxiety disorder
• social phobia
• ecological momentary assessment
• experience sampling

Acknowledgements

This project was made possible through the support of a grant to J.A.H. and J.J.A. from the John Templeton Foundation, “Prospective Psychology Stage 2: A Research Competition” to Martin Seligman. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. Thanks to Emily Lane, Rebecca Schneider, Lauren Landy, Alex Kirk, Beaudrey Vreeland, Jessica Green, Michelle Ferris, Abby Branch, Leonie Koban, and Sarah Genung, for their assistance in numerous study domains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors, J.J.A. and J.A.H., upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Specific phobias are more common than SAD but are generally more circumscribed in focus and milder in severity (Kessler et al., 2005).

2 Two participants did not provide sociodemographic data.

3 This age range was due to the fact that participants completed an fMRI scan subsequent to the 10 days of EMA sampling, the results of which will be reported elsewhere. For fMRI scans, it is common to limit age due to age-related brain changes.

4 The first participant was asked to complete a minimum of 50 EMA samples. To reduce participant burden we reduced the required minimum completion number to 35 EMA samples thereafter.

5 Eight participants did not complete the trait mind-wandering measure and two participants lacked the BDI-II.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John Templeton Foundation Science of Prospection Award# 561661 to the first and last authors.