The present study investigated the effects of cognitive load on the temporal focus of mind wandering. Participants performed a cognitive-load task under three load conditions (0 back, 1 back, 2 back). During each condition, thought sampling was conducted to measure task-unrelated thoughts. When a thought probe was presented, participants responded what they were just thinking. The results showe...

Past research on counterfactual thinking has often found that upward counterfactual thoughts lead to increased motivation to improve in future, although at the cost of increased negative affect. The present studies suggest that because upward counterfactual thoughts indicate reasons for a poor performance, they can also serve as excuses. In this case, upward counterfactual thoughts should resul...

Previous studies suggest that self-compassion is related to numerous facets of mental health, but the role of cognitions in this relationship remains unknown. To examine the mediating role of cognitions in the relationship between self-compassion and anxiety, depression, and life satisfaction when controlling for self-esteem in Japanese people, we conducted two studies. Study 1 (N = 231) examin...

Background Using Smith's (1986) cognitive-affective model of athletic burnout as a guiding framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among athletes' stress in life, negative thoughts, and the mediating role of negative thoughts on the stress-burnout relationship. Methods A total of 300 college student-athletes (males = 174; females = 126, Mage  = 20.43 y, SD = 1.68...

Recent work has highlighted that the generation of thoughts unrelated to the current environment may be both a cause and a consequence of unhappiness. The current study used lag analysis to examine whether the relationship between self-generated thought and negative affect depends on the content of the thoughts themselves. We found that the emotional content could strongly predict subsequent mo...

BACKGROUND Previous studies of paranoia have assessed only limited numbers of paranoid thoughts, and have not considered the experience from a multidimensional perspective or examined the relationship between different suspicious thoughts. AIMS To assess a wide range of paranoid thoughts multidimensionally and examine their distribution, to identify the associated coping strategies and to exa...

Gift-giving involves both the objective value of a gift and the symbolic meaning of the exchange. The objective value is sometimes considered of secondary importance as when people claim, "It's the thought that counts." We evaluated when and how mental state inferences count in gift exchanges. Because considering another's thoughts requires motivation and deliberation, we predicted gift givers'...

1 Deference and Self-Knowledge It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content1 undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of ‘comparative’ content tell just as much ag...

According to the dual representation theory of PTSD, intrusive trauma images and intrusive verbal thoughts are produced by separate memory systems. In a previous article it was shown that after watching an aversive film, participants in non-movement conditions reported more intrusive images than participants in a free-to-move control condition (Hagenaars, Van Minnen, Holmes, Brewin, & Hoogduin,...