Personal Worries May Drive Mind-Wandering in Major Depression

Key Clinical Summary

• In a preregistered study of 106 adults, individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) reported more mind-wandering than healthy controls during a continuous performance task.
• Personally relevant worries were the only specific mind-wandering content that differed between groups, including after participants with comorbid anxiety disorders were excluded.
• Both groups rated mind-wandering thoughts as more negative than on-task thoughts to a similar degree, suggesting that thought valence did not differ by MDD status.

Adults with MDD experience more mind-wandering than healthy individuals, with personally relevant worries potentially contributing to this increased frequency, according to a preregistered study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The findings provide additional detail about the thematic content and emotional valence of spontaneous thoughts in MDD.

Study Findings

Researchers sought to characterize both the content and valence of on-task and off-task thoughts and determine whether these features differed according to MDD status. The study included 53 adults diagnosed with MDD and 53 healthy controls.

Participants completed an in-person continuous performance task that involved random probes assessing their thoughts. At each probe, participants noted whether their thoughts were on-task or off-task. When reporting off-task thoughts, participants also identified their thematic content and rated thought valence on a scale ranging from negative to positive.

Those with MDD demonstrated overall higher levels of mind-wandering (54% [SD = 26%]) compared to healthy controls (40% [SD = 28%], t(103.77) = 2.766, p = 0.007, Cohen's d = 0.54 [95% CI: 0.15, 0.92]). However, differences between groups were limited when researchers examined specific categories of thought content.

The only content-specific difference identified was mind-wandering involving personally relevant worries, which occurred more frequently among participants with MDD (incidence ratio = 2.31 [95% CI: 1.22, 4.36]. This difference remained significant after investigators excluded individuals with comorbid anxiety disorders.

Mind-wandering thoughts were rated as more negative than on-task thoughts in both groups. However, the extent of this difference was similar among adults with MDD and healthy controls.

Frequencies of other specific categories of mind-wandering content also did not differ according to MDD status.

Clinical Implications

The findings help refine the characterization of mind-wandering in major depressive disorder by suggesting that differences may involve particular types of spontaneous thought rather than broad differences across multiple content categories.

Specifically, personally relevant worries may contribute to the greater frequency of mind-wandering observed among individuals with MDD. The persistence of this finding after excluding participants with comorbid anxiety disorders indicates that the observed group difference was not limited to those participants with co-occurring anxiety diagnoses.

At the same time, the results did not identify MDD-related differences in the frequency of other specific thought-content areas. Although mind-wandering was more negative than on-task thinking, this pattern occurred to a similar degree in both groups.

The researchers proposed that future studies examine whether specifically targeting worry-centric spontaneous thoughts may improve cognitive symptoms of MDD more effectively than interventions aimed broadly at reducing mind-wandering.

Expert Commentary

“This work highlights the importance of more nuanced investigations of mind wandering especially in clinical populations and provides evidence for understanding the mechanisms of rumination and identifying possible new targets in treating underlying mechanisms in MDD,” concluded Matthew S. Welhaf, PhD, MA, Department of Psychology, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina, and study coauthors.

Reference
Welhaf MS, Mata J, Jonides J, et al. Mind-wandering content in major depressive disorder: A preregistered secondary analysis. J Affect Disord. 2026 Nov 15;413:122244. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2026.122244. Epub 2026 Jul 10. PMID: 42431324.