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How daydreaming relates to life satisfaction, loneliness, and social support: The importance of gender and daydream content

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Daydreaming appears to have a complex relationship with life satisfaction and happiness. Here we demonstrate that the facets of daydreaming that predict life satisfaction differ between men and women (Study 1; N = 421), that the content of daydreams tends to be social others (Study 2; N = 17,556), and that who we daydream about influences the relation between daydreaming and happiness variables like life satisfaction, loneliness, and perceived social support (Study 3; N = 361). Specifically, daydreaming about people not close to us predicts more loneliness and less perceived social support, whereas daydreaming about close others predicts greater life satisfaction. Importantly, these patterns hold even when actual social network depth and breadth are statistically controlled, although these associations tend to be small in magnitude. Individual differences and the content of daydreams are thus important to consider when examining how happiness relates to spontaneous thoughts.

Highlights

► For men, the frequency of daydreaming predicts lower life satisfaction. ► For women, the vividness of daydreaming predicts lower life satisfaction. ► The content of daydreams is primarily social in nature, dealing with other people. ► Daydreaming about close others predicts better socio-emotional well-being. ► Daydreaming about people whom one is not close to predicts worse well-being.

Introduction

Both empirical evidence and everyday experience reveal we have a mind with a penchant for simulating alternative realities (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Almost everyone reports engaging in some form of daydreaming on a daily basis (96%; Singer & McRaven, 1961), with estimates of how much of our day is devoted to daydreaming ranging from 30% to 50% (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, Klinger and Cox, 1987). Yet there is no consensus on the role of daydreaming in emotional well-being.

On the one hand, daydreaming provides a helpful means for escaping a banal existence. People commonly report deliberately launching into vivid daydreams to ease boredom at work, for example (Fisher, 1987, Singer, 1961). Daydreaming also alleviates emotional stress, conflict, and physical pain (Lang, 1995). In fact, individuals with a proclivity for daydreaming exhibit less physiological reactance to stressful events (Singer & Antrobus, 1972), and asking people to daydream results in a less acute stress response for those anticipating an electric shock compared to those without such instructions (Rowe, 1963). In medical patients, guided daydreaming reduces the need for pain medication and shortens hospital visits (Antall & Kresevic, 2004), as well as promotes greater overall well-being during recovery (Frick et al., 2008). Daydreaming has also been associated with other positive qualities that might promote happiness. Children with a disposition for internal musings exhibit more self-control and patience than children who have no such inclination (Singer, 1961), for example.

On the other hand, daydreaming may by a symptom of dissatisfaction with one’s life. In fact, many clinical psychologists consider daydreaming a manifestation of frustration and a hallmark for a slew of mental illnesses (Freud, 1959, Rapaport, 1951). Specifically, dissociative and schizotypal disorders are associated with a tendency to fantasize excessively and difficulties separating daydreaming from reality (Wilson & Barber, 1982). Dysphoria has also been linked to mind-wandering (Carriere et al., 2008, Smallwood et al., 2007, Watts and Sharrock, 1985), with childhood loneliness predicting fantasy proneness (Rhue & Lynn, 1987) and fantasy proneness in turn predicting a wide range of psychopathologies (Muris et al., 2003, Waldo and Merritt, 2000). In extreme cases, the uncontrollable nature of these fantasies can cause distress, even when the fantasies themselves are often enjoyable (Schupak & Rosenthal, 2009).

Much of the work linking daydreaming to negative clinical outcomes has conflated a number of related constructs, however, such as fantasy proneness and dissociative experiences (Klinger, Henning, & Janssen, 2009). It is only recently that research has been done on how normal daily daydreaming relates to subjective well-being. Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) used an experience-sampling method to examine 2250 adults and found that mind-wandering was negatively related to happiness in the moment (cf. Kane et al., 2007), leading them to conclude that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Although their data argue that mind-wandering causes negative moods, an earlier study found the opposite can be true (Smallwood, Fizgerald, Miles, & Phillips, 2009). Moreover, a mind wandering from a task can be seen as distinct from daydreaming in a number of ways. Daydreaming, for example, can occur when there is no particular task at hand. As well, mind-wandering is typically defined as thinking about something despite having no intention to do so (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), whereas daydreaming can often be undertaken intentionally, as a willful respite from the present. Consistent with these observations, previous research has found that attentiveness to relevant stimuli in the environment (being “on-task”) is almost unrelated to spontaneous thoughts (akin to mind-wandering) and only weakly related to variables associated with daydreaming (Klinger & Cox, 1987).1 This illustrates the fact that related forms of spontaneous thought are separable and unique, so previous work on the affective correlates of mind-wandering should not necessarily be interpreted as comments on daydreaming.

After considering the available research the relationship between daily daydreaming and happiness remains somewhat unclear. In an attempt to further explore how daydreaming and happiness relate, we examined individual differences such as gender and age along with the content of these daydreams.

Section snippets

Study 1

In order to examine the relation between daydreaming and life satisfaction, we turned to a large, publicly available dataset known as the Eugene Springfield Community Sample (ESCS; Goldberg, 1999).

Study 2

The bulk of the research on daydreaming has focused on the temporal nature of daydreams: whether people daydream about the future of about the past (D’Argembeau et al., 2011, Mason et al., 2007; cf. Smallwood, Nind, & O’Connor, 2009). Insufficient attention has been directed at what people are actually daydreaming about and how this content might influence their feelings of well-being. Because humans are innately social in nature, the degree to which the content of our daydreams is also social

Study 3

In order to further investigate the relation between daydreaming and life satisfaction, we decided to deconstruct the social nature of daydreams. Specifically, we hypothesized that thinking about people with whom we are close while daydreaming might remind us of available social support, resulting in greater feelings of well-being. Conversely, thinking about people with whom we wish to be close but cannot—feelings of longing toward a desired but unavailable romantic partner, for example—could

Conclusions

We found a negative relation between daydreaming and happiness, but demonstrated that it is the frequency of daydreams that drives this association for men and the vividness of daydreams for women. The content of daydreams were found to be primarily social in nature and, importantly, whom people tend to daydream about affects the relation between daydreaming and happiness. Specifically, daydreaming about close friends and family predicted satisfaction with one’s life, whereas daydreaming about

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Grant awarded to RAM. We thank Marina Rain, Clarissa Cortland, and Pamela Dailey for assisting with the preparation of this manuscript. We also think John Tierny for the allowing us to collect the data for Study 2 using his New York Times science blog.

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