A Multilevel Approach to Explore the Wandering Mind and Its Connections with Mindfulness and Personality
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We propose an innovative approach to study Mind Wandering (MW), and we present an application of this methodology to study the effects of a Mindfulness-Oriented Meditation (MOM) training. We assessed individuals’ MW through a free association task and an attentional task with thought-probes combined with a questionnaire for the phenomenological characteristic of each MW episode. We used the Temperament and Character Inventory to assess participants’ personality traits and their associations with measures of MW. Our study was limited by the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and only nine healthy young individuals completed the testing sessions, which were carried out before and after the MOM training. After MOM, participants showed fewer repetitive and self-relevant thoughts and indices of better performance in the attentional task; the linguistic analysis of participants’ free associations showed lower verbal productivity and a decrease in utterances that expressed anxiety/stress. Overall, we foresee that future studies could replicate our preliminary findings with larger samples and in a period without a global health emergency. This multilevel approach to the study of MW may allow researchers to gain a broader view of the phenomenon, considering its occurrence, qualitative characteristics, impact on cognitive tasks, malleability via mindfulness or other psychological interventions, and relations with personality traits.
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Only one study has employed the TCI in relation to the assessment of verbal expression.
“To the best of our knowledge, an only study employed the TCI in relation to the assessment of verbal expression (Cantone et al., 2021).”
From The Role of Personality in Language Learning (2026) · cites this paper as Cantone et al., 2021
The Methods (section 3.8) describe both TCI scales and linguistic indices of speech from a free-association task, and the Results (section 4.5) correlate TCI scores with a measure of participants’ utterances. This supports identifying Cantone et al. as a study relating TCI to verbal expression, but the paper does not establish that it was the only such study. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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- Authors
- Cantone, D., Feruglio, S., Crescentini, C., Cinot, S., & Matiz, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Udine (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Cantone, Damiano
- Venue
- Behavioral Sciences
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2021-09-18
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 125
- ISSN
- 2076-328X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8469085
- OpenAlex
- W3200277931
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 0.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Behavioral Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Institutional Research Information System (University of Udine) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Mind wandering and attention
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Cognitive Functions and Memory
- Keywords
- mind wandering, personality traits, free association, thought probes, attention, repetitive thinking, stress and anxiety, multilevel analysis
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