Title:

The influence of mood and generating personal connections on mind-wandering during reading

Prior research suggests that positive and negative moods have dissociable effects on comprehension outcomes; however, the influence of mood on thought processes during reading is less understood. The current study therefore explores two types of thought processes in relation to mood during reading: 1) how often participants make personal connections with information from the text and 2) rates of mind-wandering (measured as off-task thought). Participants were induced with either a happy or sad mood, followed by a reading task with intermittently dispersed thought probes. Making a personal connection with the text was positively related to wandering off-task in general, B = .47, p = .01; this finding was stronger for participants in the sad condition, B = 1.31, p < .001, in comparison to the happy condition, B = .48, p = .01. These findings highlight the critical influence of mood on how we process information during reading.

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