Further unpacking age-related differences in mind wandering: The roles of emotional valence and meta-awareness

Age-related differences in mind wandering are robust. However, previous work examining such differences rarely considered the specific content of participants' mind wandering. We sought to replicate prior work showing that older adults' reduced frequency of mind wandering is specific to negative and neutral thoughts, and extend this work by examining the role of perceived stress in this pattern. We also tested if older and younger adults differed in the meta-awareness of their emotionally valenced mind wandering. Older and younger adults completed a sustained attention task with periodic thought probes and were instructed to self-catch any instances of mind wandering they had during the task. Consistent with prior work, older adults reported less mind wandering overall. Critically, using thought probes, we replicated the specific pattern of an age-related reduction in negative and neutral mind-wandering reports, but similar rates of positive mind-wandering between age groups. Further, the age-related difference in negative mind wandering was still evident after accounting for participants' level of perceived stress. There were also age-related differences in participants' self-caught mind wandering. While older adults had fewer self-caught episodes overall, the age difference was largest for neutral reports and smallest for negative reports. Age-related differences in the processing of, and preference for, certain emotional information appear to be evident in participants' off-task thinking. Our findings highlight that age-related differences in mind wandering might not be consistent across different contents and that future work should consider mind-wandering content, such as emotional valence, when testing for age-related differences.