Mind-wandering occurs when thoughts become unrelated to the task at hand, a phenomenon commonly experienced by adults and children. Recent research has revealed that mind-wandering can negatively impact children's learning. However, no studies have explored parents' perspectives of their children's mind-wandering, despite the crucial role parents play in supporting children's learning. This study investigated how parents of children in the first years of formal education perceive and manage mind-wandering during school tasks. Three online focus groups were conducted with parents (N=7) from the island of Ireland. Reflexive thematic analysis resulted in the development of five themes: 1) Mind-wandering is a typical, positive element of learning in children, 2) Mind-wandering is more likely to occur in certain circumstances, 3) Children tend to share the content of their mind-wandering, providing parents with valuable insights, 4) Parents adopt a trial-and-error approach to the management of mind-wandering, 5) Parents’ frustration with mind-wandering arises from time constraints. Although parents generally feel confident in the management of mind-wandering during learning activities, they expressed concerns about future challenges as homework becomes more demanding. These findings can inform further research by acknowledging parents' expressed needs, so that children can be adequately supported before mind-wandering impacts their learning.

A growing body of research shows that thinking episodically about the future (i.e., "episodic future thinking"; EFT) enhances decisions that entail present-future trade-offs. Although such "EFT-cueing" effects have wide-ranging implications for both improving behavioral decision-making (e.g., health-related choices) and theory building, this literature has so far neglected two critical aspects. First, EFT-cueing is not similarly effective across the lifespan, with a majority of recent studies showing no benefit in children and mixed effects in older adults. Second, EFT-cueing has predominantly targeted intertemporal choice, which is but one form of (potentially) biased decision-making; whether other forms might also benefit from EFT-cueing is not known. Accordingly, we draw attention to a set of forecasting biases that EFT-cueing may also mitigate, including projection bias, end of history illusion, impact bias, and the planning fallacy. We also consider whether for populations and biases for which EFT-cueing is less effective, other developmentally and contextually appropriate debiasing techniques/interventions, including emotionally engaging with future events and perspective shifting, need be harnessed. These efforts hold both practical and theoretical implications about how to optimize decision-making across the lifespan and the kinds of interventions best suited to decisional context and developmental stage.

Previous research with adults and adolescents has established that mind wandering—characterized by a shift in attention from external tasks to internal thoughts—is associated with negative affect and reduced psychological well‐being, particularly when focused on past events. This study explored the relations between low mood, worry, and the frequency and temporal orientation of mind wandering in children aged 8–12 years ( N = 77). In a testing session conducted via videoconferencing software, we assessed mind wandering using intermittent thought probes during a listening activity and collected mood and worry data through self‐report questionnaires and carer reports. Our findings indicate that children's minds wandered approximately 23% of the time, aligning with existing literature. We found a significant association between lower mood and increased mind wandering. Specifically, children with lower mood showed a higher propensity for mind wandering. Moreover, low mood was a significant predictor of past‐oriented mind wandering, and a significant relation was observed between worry and future‐oriented thought. These results highlight the need for future research using experimental designs to clarify the causal relationships between children's mood, worry, and mind wandering. A deeper understanding of these dynamics is essential for developing targeted interventions that aim to enhance emotional well‐being in children.

OBJECTIVE:Recent studies of decision-related emotions and health decision-making show that, in addition to anticipated regret, anticipated counterfactual relief (relief for choosing one option over an alternative) predicts vaccination intentions and behaviors, but this is not so for anticipated temporal relief (relief that an unpleasant experience is over). However, these studies did not explore the effects of prompting different decision-related emotions on intentions and behavior. In this experimental study, we explored the effects of prompting participants to anticipate counterfactual relief, temporal relief, or regret on influenza vaccination intentions and behavior. METHODS:Unvaccinated participants (N = 736) were assigned to one of three anticipated emotion conditions or to one of two control conditions. Those in the anticipated emotion conditions completed measures of anticipated regret, counterfactual relief or temporal relief, and measures of the Theory of Planned Behavior constructs (attitudes, norms, perceived control, and intentions). Controls completed Theory of Planned Behavior measures or only reported intentions. Participants reported their vaccination status one month later. RESULTS:All three anticipated emotions had indirect effects on vaccination status at Time 2 via intentions. These indirect effects were more pronounced for anticipated regret and anticipated counterfactual relief than anticipated temporal relief. Prompting counterfactual relief significantly increased vaccination intentions compared to controls, but did not affect vaccination status. CONCLUSIONS:The results provide the first evidence that prompting participants to anticipate counterfactual relief increases intentions to be vaccinated compared to controls. These findings reinforce claims that the anticipation of both negative and positive decision-related counterfactual emotions may improve health-related decision-making.

Unlike studies with adolescents and adults, studies with children have yet to uncover a link between episodic future thinking (EFT) and delay of gratification (DoG) and EFT cueing has not been shown to enhance children's DoG. Understanding developmental patterns requires better understanding of the processes underlying children's DoG performance. This study examined whether individual differences predicted 8-11-year-olds' (53% M) performance on two separate DoG tasks, each with or without EFT cueing: a delay choice task with real rewards and a delay discounting task with hypothetical monetary rewards. It also examined whether these measures predicted children's ability to benefit from EFT cueing. The children were from Ireland, primarily White, and ranged from marginally below average to above average SES. In analyses controlling for age and general verbal ability, none of our variables predicted the difference in performance between the uncued and EFT-cued versions of either task. Positive contemplation emotion, reflecting the extent to which a child takes pleasure from anticipating positive future events, was the sole significant predictor of performance on a delay choice task with EFT cues, controlling for age and verbal ability. For the delay discounting task, EFT ability, working memory and a more proactive attentional control style were all significant predictors of performance on an EFT-cued version of the task, but not on an uncued version. Engaging in EFT cueing seems to be effortful for children, and greater cognitive resources may be needed to buffer against the cognitive load associated with future thinking cues in delay discounting tasks.

Some theoretical accounts of relief distinguish between temporal relief, experienced due to the ending of an aversive episode, and counterfactual relief, experienced because an aversive outcome was avoided. Recent results suggest that the prototypical relief experience has both elements: the avoidance of an aversive outcome and the ending of a period of anxiety regarding that outcome. This result is consistent with an alternative theoretical approach that all instances of relief necessarily have a temporal precursor, with the aversive experience that comes to an end in the prototypical case being the cessation of anxiety. We examined whether people experience counterfactual relief in the absence of a prior period of anxiety and whether such instances differ markedly in intensity from instances of counterfactual relief involving anxiety cessation. In Study 1 (N = 238) participants readily described instances of purely counterfactual relief when directed. In Studies 2 (N = 38) and 3 (N = 98), participants’ attributions of relief in cases with purely counterfactual precursors were comparable to their attributions when there was also a temporal precursor. These results suggest that purely counterfactual relief is experienced in everyday life and that the intensity of the relief experienced is of the same order as that of counterfactual relief that is preceded by anxiety cessation.

OBJECTIVE:Anticipated regret has been implicated in health-related decision-making. Recent work on influenza vaccination has suggested that anticipated relief, too, may influence individuals' decisions to engage in positive health behaviours. To explore these affective components further and address the generality of possible mechanisms underlying these associations, we examined whether anticipated relief and anticipated regret independently predict testicular self-examination (TSE) intention and behaviour. Given claims about differences in their nature and function, we distinguished between counterfactual relief (relief that a worse outcome did not obtain) and temporal relief (relief that an unpleasant experience is over). DESIGN:Prospective correlational. METHODS:At Time 1 (July 2022), 567 cis-gendered males were asked to complete measures of anticipated regret, anticipated counterfactual and temporal relief, measures of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and measures of anxiety and shame. One month later, the same participants were recontacted and asked about their engagement in TSE in the previous month. RESULTS:Anticipated counterfactual relief and anticipated regret are independent, positive, predictors of intention to engage in TSE and, indirectly, TSE behaviour itself. Interestingly, anticipated temporal relief was negatively associated with intention to engage in TSE and, indirectly, behaviour. CONCLUSIONS:Our results suggest that it may be the counterfactual nature of anticipated regret and anticipated relief that underlies their positive association with TSE and other health-promoting behaviours. Interventions designed to increase engagement in preventive health behaviours, such as TSE, may benefit from the consideration of both positively and negatively valenced counterfactual emotions.

Mind wandering, where attention drifts from the here-and-now to internal thoughts, is often linked to decreased educational performance. However, its impact on children remains largely unexplored. This study introduces and evaluates a method for measuring mind wandering in classroom environments. A sample of 126 8-9-year-olds participated in a listening activity where they periodically categorized their thoughts before completing immediate and delayed memory tests. Children reported being off-task in 45% of responses, 22% of which were mind wandering and 23% of which were thoughts about distractions. Our findings reveal that classroom mind wandering is common and can adversely affect immediate memory recall. The long-term implications of mind wandering in childhood are still uncertain, highlighting the need for further research. The results demonstrate the feasibility of assessing off-task thought in the classroom using thought probes that differentiate between distractions and mind wandering, which have distinct causes and may require tailored responses.

It has been argued that adult humans are absolutely time biased towards the future, at least as far as purely hedonic experiences (pain/pleasure) are concerned. What this means is that they assign zero value to them once they are in the past. Recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this claim, suggesting that while adults hold asymmetrical hedonic preferences – preferring painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future – these preferences are not absolute and are often abandoned when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is greater in the past than in the future. Research has also examined whether such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign to experiential memories, since the recollection of past events can itself be pleasurable or aversive. We extend this line of research, investigating the utility people assign to experiential memories regardless of tense, and provide – to our knowledge – the first quantitative attempt at directly comparing the relative subjective weightings given to ‘primary’ experiences (i.e., living through the event first-hand) and ‘secondary’ (i.e., recollective or anticipatory) experiences. We find that when painful events are located in the past, the importance of the memory of the pain appears to be enhanced relative to its importance when they are located in the future. We also find extensive individual differences in hedonic preferences, reasons to adopt them, and willingness to trade them off. This research allows for a clearer picture of the utility people assign to the consumption of recollective experiences and of how this contributes to, or perhaps masks, time biases.

Previous studies have failed to show an effect of episodic future thinking (EFT) on children's delay of gratification (DoG), contrasting strikingly with adult findings. Recent findings from a sample of 8-11-year-old children by Canning et al. (J. Exp. Child Psychol., 228, 2023, 105618) indicate that EFT cueing is not effective compared to a no-cue control even when it is reward related. Canning et al. suggest children's DoG performance, unlike that of adults, may be negatively affected by the cognitive load of cueing, but this leaves unexplained why EFT reward-related cueing produced significantly better performance than cueing that did not involve EFT in their study. The current study attempted to further delineate the importance of linking future thinking cues to rewards. A reward-related EFT condition was compared to a reward-unrelated EFT condition and a no-cue control on a delay choice task. No significant differences were observed between the three conditions. This suggests that even reward-related future thinking is ineffective at improving children's delayed gratification. Further research is needed to determine why children struggle to benefit from EFT cues.

OBJECTIVE:Anticipated regret has been found to predict vaccination intentions and behaviours. We examined whether anticipated relief also predicts seasonal influenza vaccination intentions and behaviour. Given claims about differences in their antecedents and function, we distinguished between counterfactual relief (relief that a worse outcome did not obtain) and temporal relief (relief that an unpleasant experience is over).DESIGN:Cross-sectional.METHODS:Unvaccinated participants (N = 295) were recruited online in November 2020. Participants completed measures of anticipated regret, anticipated counterfactual relief, and anticipated temporal relief and measures of theory of planned behaviour constructs (attitudes, norms, perceived control, and intentions). One month later, the same participants were re-surveyed and asked to report their vaccination status.RESULTS:Although all anticipated emotion measures were associated with intentions and behaviour, only anticipated counterfactual relief and regret independently predicted vaccination intentions in regression analyses. Mediation analysis showed both anticipated counterfactual relief and regret were indirectly, via intentions, associated with behaviour.CONCLUSIONS:Results suggest that, regardless of valence, counterfactual emotions predict vaccination intention and, indirectly, behaviour. Furthermore, participants may differ in their sensitivity to the anticipation of positive versus negative counterfactual emotions. These findings may permit more precise targeting of interventions to increase vaccine uptake.

Background When facing the consequences of decisions, people often experience evaluative emotions such as regret. The experience of regret is the result of the comparison between the actual outcome of one’s actions and a better counterfactual outcome that could have occurred had one acted differently in the past. Despite increasing interest in counterfactual thinking and regret, little is known about the type of cognitive processes involved with regret –whether it is underpinned by reflective or intuitive processes. The extant literature provides contradictory evidence: theoretical assertions and developmental work point towards reflective processes, requiring access to capacity-limited cognitive resources whereas, some experimental and neuroscientific evidence point towards intuitive processes. Methods In the current study, adults (N = 20) completed a commonly used gambling task known to elicit regret under high or low working memory load. Results Ratings of regret were not affected by concurrent working memory load (Bayes Factors provided strong evidence for the null hypothesis). Conclusions We conclude that the experience of regret in a commonly used gambling task is unaffected by concurrent working memory load. This suggests that, in adults, regret is not always reliant on reflective cognitive processes and does not require access to central cognitive resources.

Over the course of his research, Endel Tulving offered a number of somewhat different characterizations of episodic memory. Do they indicate that he changed his mind over time as to what episodic memory is, or did his core understanding of the nature of episodic memory stay the same? In this article, we offer some support for the latter claim, and in particular for thinking that, throughout his life, Tulving took as a defining feature of episodic memory the distinctive awareness of the self in time it involves. We argue that it is easier to see the continuities rather than the discontinuities in Tulving’s writings once their historical context is taken into account, where this involves both the authors who influenced his thinking, as well as the intellectual climate at the different times he was writing. We also discuss two recent bodies of work on episodic memory that take aspects of Tulving’s writings as their point of departure, but try to factor out into separate ingredients what he arguably saw as a unitary phenomenon. Considering aspects of the dialectic between them and Tulving’s view might shed further light on some of the motivations behind the latter. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research’.

Despite the implementation of equality interventions within higher education, progress towards gender parity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) remains slow. Male educators often exhibit poorer engagement with diversity initiatives, potentially contributing to persisting gender disparities in STEM given men’s longstanding dominance in these programs. Two experiments investigate how equality interventions should be designed to maximize support from male educators. Experiment 1 (N = 72; Mage = 39.72, SDage = 12.33) used virtual reality to manipulate 2 factors among male academics: (1) exposure to gender inequality and (2) virtually taking the perspective of a female scientist. Using self-report and behavioral measures, viewing an empirical presentation outlining the prevalence of gender issues in STEM yielded the greatest support for equality initiatives following successful perspective-taking. Experiment 2 (N = 120; Mage = 32.48, SDage = 10.36) varied two additional factors among male academics: (1) evidence-based methods to reduce gender biases in STEM (i.e., promoting self-efficacy) and (2) blaming male academics for gender inequalities. Promoting self-efficacy and blaming men for disparities led to greater confidence in male academics’ ability to address gender inequalities in their field. Notably, higher self-efficacy accounted for greater support for equality initiatives and internal motives to engage with diversity programs. Findings provide an empirical framework and high-tech training tools for promoting engagement with diversity initiatives among male educators, informing development of interventions within higher education to improve student and faculty experiences in STEM.

We review existing research on intertemporal choice in children that has used delay choice tasks, a type of delay gratification task that typically involves choosing between a smaller reward now and a larger reward later. We align developmental research with some of the large body of empirical and theoretical work in this area that has been conducted with adults, with a focus on methodological appropriateness, the effectiveness of experimental manipulations, and role of future thinking processes in intertemporal choice. We conclude that, with care, it is possible to use delay discounting tasks with children from around 8 years that are similar to those that have been used with adults; simpler delay choice tasks are likely to yield robust data from around 3 years. Experimental manipulations to enhance performance have generally been less successful with child populations than adults, but there is some evidence that learning-based and framing approaches can increase the likelihood that children delay gratification. We outline a detailed theoretical framework, based on existing research with adults, that describes the various ways in which future thinking processes may contribute to intertemporal choice, and argue that some of these processes may develop relatively late. This means that the nature of the relation between future thinking and intertemporal choice may change substantially with development.

People's emotional states are influenced not just by events occurring in the present but also by how events have unfolded in the past and how they are likely to unfold in the future. To what extent do young children understand the ways in which past events can affect current emotions even if they are no longer ongoing? In the current study, we explored children's ability to understand how others feel at the cessation of events-as events change from being present to being past. We asked 97 4- to 6-year-olds (40.2% female) and 35 adults (54.3% female) to judge how characters felt once particular types of events had ended relative to how they felt during these events. We found that from age 4, children judged (as adults do) that the character would feel positive at the cessation of negative events-what we refer to as temporal relief. This understanding of relief occurs earlier than has been shown in previous research. However, children were less likely than adults to judge others as feeling sad at the cessation of positive events-what we refer to as temporal disappointment. Overall, our findings suggest that children not only understand that the cessation of events can affect others' emotions but also recognize that people feel differently following the cessation of positive, negative, and neutral events.

The relations between prosocial risk taking (taking a risk to benefit another person; PSRT) and interpersonal regret (regret that one's choices have caused a poor outcome for another person) were examined in 192 children aged 7-9. PSRT was measured by children's choices within a gambling task in which one choice guaranteed participants a good prize whereas the other involved risking this prize to help a peer also win a good prize. Interpersonal regret was assessed within the same task by examining children's change in emotion when they learned they would have won a better prize for a peer had they chosen differently. Performance on this task was also examined in relation to sympathy and resource sharing. Findings indicated that the operationalizations of PSRT and interpersonal regret were meaningful. Children who took a prosocial risk were more generous in a resource sharing task. In some circumstances, children who took a prosocial risk were also more likely to experience interpersonal regret than those who did not take a prosocial risk, indicating that experiencing interpersonal regret may be related to individual differences in prosociality. However, experiencing interpersonal regret did not have a direct effect on subsequent prosocial behavior, when measured by resource sharing. We consider findings in relation to a possible distinction between outcome and process regret and the generalizability of the behavioral consequences of regret.

Despite being implicated in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenomena, relief remains poorly understood from the perspective of psychological science. What complicates the study of relief is that people seem to use the term to describe an emotion that occurs in two distinct situations: when an unpleasant episode is over, or upon realizing that an outcome could have been worse. This study constitutes a detailed empirical investigation of people's reports of everyday episodes of relief. A set of four studies collected a large corpus (N = 1,835) of first-person reports of real-life episodes of relief and examined people's judgments about the antecedents of relief, its relation to counterfactual thoughts, and its subsequent effects on decision making. Some participants described relief experiences that had either purely temporal or purely counterfactual precursors. Nevertheless, the findings indicated that the prototypical instance of relief appears to be one in which both these elements are present. The results also suggest that, although relief is frequently experienced in situations in which people are not responsible for the relief-inducing event, nevertheless they typically report that the experience had a positive impact on subsequent decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Mind wandering occurs when attention becomes disengaged from the here-and-now and directed toward internally generated thoughts; this is often associated with poorer performance on educationally significant tasks. In this study, 8- to 9-year-old children ( N = 60) listened to audio stories embedded with intermittent thought probes that were used to determine if participants’ thoughts were on or off task. The key objective was to explore the impact of probe-caught mind wandering on both immediate and delayed memory retention. Children reported being off task approximately 24% of the time. Most inattention episodes were classified as task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., ‘pure’ instances of mind wandering, 9%) or attentional failures due to distractions (9%). Higher frequency of mind wandering was strongly associated with poorer memory recall, and task-unrelated thoughts strongly predicted how well children could recall components of the audio story both immediately after the task and after a 1-week delay. This study is the first to demonstrate the impact of mind wandering on delayed memory retention in children. Results suggest that exploring mind wandering in the foundational years of schooling could provide the necessary empirical foundation for the development of practical interventions geared toward detecting and refocusing lapses of attention in educational contexts.