“Just Think”—Students Feel Significantly More Relaxed, Less Aroused, and in a Better Mood after a Period of Silence Alone in a Room

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present an interesting follow-up to work by Wilson et al on “thinking for pleasure.” I was excited to see researchers following up on this work, and particularly appreciated the methodological detail reported (the photos in particular were a very nice touch). The sample size was also appropriate, given the size of previous effects in this literature. Unfortunately my enthusiasm is limited by two factors: 1) a lack of theoretical clarity in situating this study among more recent work on the topic, and 2) a non-experimental approach that lacks a control condition for comparison. 

While Wilson et al reported several purely descriptive studies, they also reported experimental manipulations as well, explicitly comparing instructions to think for pleasure with other alternatives. For instance, in Study 8 they compared “thinking pleasurable thoughts” in solitude to “doing pleasant activities” in solitude, and found people enjoyed “doing” much more than “thinking”. Notably, this study involved random assignment to condition; participants were not allowed to choose their activity as the manuscript reports on p. 2 (“In study 8, participants could decide on their own whether they wanted to engage themselves with their own thoughts or perform a diverting activity, such as reading a book, listening to music, or spending time surfing the Web”, line 46-47). Those experimental effects have since been replicated in 11 countries (Buttrick et al, 2018, JPSP) and by multiple independent teams as part of large-scale replication projects (Camerer et al, 2018; Smith & Frank, 2015). 

Such experimental manipulations are critical to making causal claims about whether it is thinking, waiting, or solitude itself that is responsible for effects on emotion. Without a comparison condition, it is impossible to say why people in the study reported the feelings they did, and how much they were due to the activity (“thinking”) vs the context (solitude, uncertainty about time) vs simple regression to the mean. It is particularly difficult to interpret decline effects in non-experimental pre-post designs, given that regression to the mean can largely account for such findings (and indeed may account for many apparent “effects” of clinical placebos, Hengartner, 2019). In addition, it is hard to draw firm conclusions about how enjoyable an activity is without a control comparison to draw on, as the debate between Wilson et al and Fox et al amply demonstrates. 

Given these concerns, it is difficult to interpret the results of the present study, and difficult to situate its conceptual contribution to the literature. This is made more challenging because the results are not currently situated in the larger literature on thinking for pleasure or the effects of solitude.  Recent experimental work, for instance, has shown that people find it difficult to think for pleasure, which dampens enjoyment, but simple cognitive aids can make it easier and more enjoyable (Westgate, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2017). Other work has compared “thinking for pleasure” to “thinking whatever you want”, and found that giving people the goal of enjoying their own thoughts increases enjoyment, relative to undirected thought or to instructions to engage in planning (Alahmadi et al., 2017). Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci (2018) found similar results, and compared it to the effects of solitude more generally, finding support for a general dampening effect of solitude (eg, solitude decreased positive affect, but decreased negative affect as well). This latter work seems particularly relevant to the author’s’ interests; it was unclear at times whether the authors were primarily interested in thinking for pleasure, or more interested in solitude and what people choose to do when filling unoccupied periods of waiting or downtimes. 

Finally, in a recent ADVANCES chapter, Wilson, Westgate, Buttrick, & Gilbert (2019) present empirical evidence for a theoretical trade-off model of thinking for pleasure, in which people find thinking for pleasure more meaningful (which makes it more enjoyable) than many alternative activities, but also more cognitively demanding and difficult to succeed at (which makes it less enjoyable). Critically, they found that the exact instructions to participants matter: instructions to enjoy their own thoughts result in different levels of enjoyment than instructions to think whatever you want or to plan your day, even when participants are otherwise following identical procedures. To this end, it would be helpful for the authors  of the current study to provide the exact wording of the instructions to participants, to aid in comparison with prior findings. 

The body of work described above also presents evidence counter to some of the authors’ proposed conclusions; for instance, in a sample of over 10,000 participants, Wilson et al (2019) found no gender differences in enjoyment of thinking for pleasure. This makes it unlikely that the effects of the present paper are due to differences in gender composition in the sample (see p. 8, lines 286-290). This paper also finds that effects are not contingent on solitude during the thinking activity, providing further evidence for the need to disambiguate cognitive activity from contextual features (e.g., solitude, environmental stimulation) via rigorous experimental controls. Similarly, given that there were no differences in enjoyment of thinking in the 11 countries (i.e., Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, Malaysia, Portugal, Serbia, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, US) examined in Buttrick et al. (2018)’s cross-cultural comparison of thinking for pleasure, it seems unlikely that cultural differences between the US and Germany account for the authors’ findings (see abstract + p. 8, lines 280-288). 

While I value the role of replication in research, I am unsure of the conceptual contribution of the current study; selection of which studies to replicate and how closely to adhere to original procedures is a critical part of the replication process (see Brandt et al., 2014, JESP). Given the considerable methodological deviations here (e.g., an entirely new set of dependent measures, additional trait measures prior to the critical thinking period that may have influenced online experience), the current study does not constitute a direct or “close” replication. Nor has it used revised procedures adopted by the original authors in including appropriate experimental controls and random assignment to condition. Given this, I am not sure the methodology warrants the causal conclusions drawn at present. If the authors were to replicate the current study in a well-powered sample with random assignment to either their experimental condition or an appropriately informative control group, and situate the results of both studies together more clearly in light of recent work on this topic, I would welcome that contribution to the literature.

Author Response

The authors present an interesting follow-up to work by Wilson et al on “thinking for pleasure.” I was excited to see researchers following up on this work, and particularly appreciated the methodological detail reported (the photos in particular were a very nice touch). The sample size was also appropriate, given the size of previous effects in this literature. Unfortunately my enthusiasm is limited by two factors: 1) a lack of theoretical clarity in situating this study among more recent work on the topic, and 2) a non-experimental approach that lacks a control condition for comparison. 

·       Thank you very much for your kind feedback and the critical remarks on how to improve our manuscript. We reworked our manuscript according to your suggestions. However, it is very important to mention that we, strictly speaking, did not conduct a replication of the Wilson et al. study. Instead, we aimed to expand Wilson et al.’s approach by including variables referring to the perception of time. Since the perception of time is a typical feature of waiting situations (without a task or with a tedious task to perform), we wanted to assess this component. Our study can not be interpreted as a direct replication, although we formulated it that way (this has been changed), not only due to the fact that we did conduct a control task, here people entertained themselves (and experimental variation), but wanted to assess subjective time in relation to the other state and trait variables under consideration.

·       See also the final paragraph of section 1:

Referring to the comment: “This was a replication of the principle study design by Wilson et al. [5] where people were asked to “think” while waiting.” Our individuals did not have to think anything specific, i.e. about a certain content.

While Wilson et al reported several purely descriptive studies, they also reported experimental manipulations as well, explicitly comparing instructions to think for pleasure with other alternatives. For instance, in Study 8 they compared “thinking pleasurable thoughts” in solitude to “doing pleasant activities” in solitude, and found people enjoyed “doing” much more than “thinking”. Notably, this study involved random assignment to condition; participants were not allowed to choose their activity as the manuscript reports on p. 2 (“In study 8, participants could decide on their own whether they wanted to engage themselves with their own thoughts or perform a diverting activity, such as reading a book, listening to music, or spending time surfing the Web”, line 46-47). Those experimental effects have since been replicated in 11 countries (Buttrick et al, 2018, JPSP) and by multiple independent teams as part of large-scale replication projects (Camerer et al, 2018; Smith & Frank, 2015). 

·       Thank you for this important remark. We corrected the specific passage as follows:

In study 8, participants were randomly assigned to conditions and therefore either engaged themselves with their own thoughts or performed a diverting activity, such as reading an enjoyable book, listening to music, or spending time surfing the Web. 

In general, we want to emphasize that we deliberately chose not to conduct an experimental approach with two different condition, i.e. “just thinking” and “reading a book”. Following a prior study which assessed a real waiting situation (Jokic et al., 2018), we were interested in measuring specifically subjective time in a situation of “being alone with your thoughts” and in relation to affect (such as boredom).

·       Furthermore, we added this to our introductory section:

Recently, researchers [6] analyzed 21 experimental study reports that had originally been published between 2010 and 2015. The Wilson et al. studies were part of this large-scale replication project. Wilson et al. were among the 12 replications that showed minor deviations from the pre-registered replication protocols and a significant effect to the one in the original studies. Buttrick et al. [7] conducted a direct replication of Wilson et al.’s study 8 with participants from 12 sites in 11 countries. The sample in the original study by Wilson et al. consisted of American participants only. Buttrick and colleagues summarized that the average effect size of the replication was quite large though smaller than in the original study. The overall cross-cultural outcomes of the replication showed that participants preferred to engage in everyday activities (reading or watching a video) than to turn one’s attention inward and to think for pleasure.

Such experimental manipulations are critical to making causal claims about whether it is thinking, waiting, or solitude itself that is responsible for effects on emotion. Without a comparison condition, it is impossible to say why people in the study reported the feelings they did, and how much they were due to the activity (“thinking”) vs the context (solitude, uncertainty about time) vs simple regression to the mean. It is particularly difficult to interpret decline effects in non-experimental pre-post designs, given that regression to the mean can largely account for such findings (and indeed may account for many apparent “effects” of clinical placebos, Hengartner, 2019). In addition, it is hard to draw firm conclusions about how enjoyable an activity is without a control comparison to draw on, as the debate between Wilson et al and Fox et al amply demonstrates. 

·       As mentioned, we did not aim at a replication of the experimental setup in a narrow sense, i.e. having a “just think” and a “read” condition. We aimed at assessing subjective time measures, in our opinion a gap we wanted to fill. In situations of waiting or other stressful situations (as the “just think” situation appeared to be for many individuals in the studies conducted by Wilson and colleagues), time is the focus of attention. The results are similar to the variables of affect. Next to quite some relaxation and positive mood, and no boredom, people also judged time to pass relatively quickly.

Given these concerns, it is difficult to interpret the results of the present study, and difficult to situate its conceptual contribution to the literature. This is made more challenging because the results are not currently situated in the larger literature on thinking for pleasure or the effects of solitude.  Recent experimental work, for instance, has shown that people find it difficult to think for pleasure, which dampens enjoyment, but simple cognitive aids can make it easier and more enjoyable (Westgate, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2017). Other work has compared “thinking for pleasure” to “thinking whatever you want”, and found that giving people the goal of enjoying their own thoughts increases enjoyment, relative to undirected thought or to instructions to engage in planning (Alahmadi et al., 2017). Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci (2018) found similar results, and compared it to the effects of solitude more generally, finding support for a general dampening effect of solitude (eg, solitude decreased positive affect, but decreased negative affect as well). This latter work seems particularly relevant to the author’s’ interests; it was unclear at times whether the authors were primarily interested in thinking for pleasure, or more interested in solitude and what people choose to do when filling unoccupied periods of waiting or downtimes. 

·       We expanded our discussion section, added relevant literature and mentioned major details:

Interestingly, the aspect of thinking as an enjoyable activity has recently been addressed in publications under the headline of “thinking for pleasure”. Studies showed that “thinking for pleasure” does not come easily, it may even be cognitively demanding, but can be enjoyable if conducted under the right conditions with simple cognitive aids making it easier and more enjoyable for study participants [22,23]. In one of these studies [23] participants reported that the more they aimed to have pleasant thoughts, the more enjoyment the actually experienced. Motivation may also be an important factor. Alahmadi et al. [24] found that instructions helped participants if they were instructed or given the goal to entertain themselves with their thoughts and to enjoy such times of thinking. Motivation was the crucial catalyst making thinking enjoyable in this case. However, in our study participants were not given any specific goals, tasks or instructions, nor was there any other motivating support. We solely asked the participants to spend a period of silent time, that was of unknown duration to them, to occupy themselves with their own thoughts alone in a room. This led to a significant decrease in arousal, a significant increase in relaxation, a positive mood and enjoyment in the study participants. Comparably, a study conducted by Nguyen et al. [25] pointed towards the effectiveness of solitude on arousal and self-regulation. 15 minutes of solitude, of being alone, sitting on a comfortable chair, in silence, helped participants to become quiet, to calm down and to regulate their affective states. The outcomes of our study can be discussed in the light of Nguyen et al.’s findings although we relied on a silent period of time lasting 6:30 minutes instead of 15 minutes.

·       We also added this: 

This is in fact a topic for further intercultural investigations, especially as current cross-cultural investigations, conducted in 11 countries, indicate that “thinking for pleasure” was judged significantly less enjoyable across cultures than being engaged with an external activity [7,23]. There were in fact cross-cultural differences in judging the period of “just thinking”, which were explainable through variations of individual differences. One such cross-cultural difference was “experience with meditation”. This brings us back to our specific subgroup of students of “Social Work/Social Education” who through their curricula are exposed to techniques of mindful concentration and which might explain the high levels of positive affect and relaxation in our study group.

Finally, in a recent ADVANCES chapter, Wilson, Westgate, Buttrick, & Gilbert (2019) present empirical evidence for a theoretical trade-off model of thinking for pleasure, in which people find thinking for pleasure more meaningful (which makes it more enjoyable) than many alternative activities, but also more cognitively demanding and difficult to succeed at (which makes it less enjoyable). Critically, they found that the exact instructions to participants matter: instructions to enjoy their own thoughts result in different levels of enjoyment than instructions to think whatever you want or to plan your day, even when participants are otherwise following identical procedures. To this end, it would be helpful for the authors  of the current study to provide the exact wording of the instructions to participants, to aid in comparison with prior findings. 

·       Please see above-mentioned additions to our manuscript. We added relevant aspects, such as “thinking for pleasure” to our manuscript and considered them in our discussion section.

·       We added this:
“Afterwards, participants were asked to spend the following silent time on their own. The exact wording was: “Please spend the following time occupying yourself with your own thoughts and please stay seated and awake.””

The body of work described above also presents evidence counter to some of the authors’ proposed conclusions; for instance, in a sample of over 10,000 participants, Wilson et al (2019) found no gender differences in enjoyment of thinking for pleasure. This makes it unlikely that the effects of the present paper are due to differences in gender composition in the sample (see p. 8, lines 286-290). This paper also finds that effects are not contingent on solitude during the thinking activity, providing further evidence for the need to disambiguate cognitive activity from contextual features (e.g., solitude, environmental stimulation) via rigorous experimental controls. Similarly, given that there were no differences in enjoyment of thinking in the 11 countries (i.e., Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, Malaysia, Portugal, Serbia, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, US) examined in Buttrick et al. (2018)’s cross-cultural comparison of thinking for pleasure, it seems unlikely that cultural differences between the US and Germany account for the authors’ findings (see abstract + p. 8, lines 280-288). 

·       We did not emphasize the gender differences, so we don’t want to delve too much into this issue. However, there were clear gender differences in the Wilson et al. 2014 study: “67% of men gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period […] compared to 25% of women (6 of 24; range = 0 to 9 shocks, M = 1.00, SD = 2.32). [ …]. The gender difference is probably due to the tendency for men to be higher in sensation-seeking. And we did not instruct people in “enjoyment of thinking for pleasure”.

·       Cultural differences: As we read the fascinating research, there are no cultural variations for the differences between the conditions “just think” and “entertain”. This is universally true. But there were clear differences for how people experienced the “just think” condition. We accordingly wrote a paragraph and relate it to our findings: “There were in fact cross-cultural differences in judging the period of “just thinking”, which were explainable through variations of individual differences. One such cross-cultural difference was “experience with meditation”. This brings us back to our specific subgroup of students of “Social Work/Social Education” who through their curricula are exposed to techniques of mindful concentration and which might explain the high levels of positive affect and relaxation in our study group.“

While I value the role of replication in research, I am unsure of the conceptual contribution of the current study; selection of which studies to replicate and how closely to adhere to original procedures is a critical part of the replication process (see Brandt et al., 2014, JESP). Given the considerable methodological deviations here (e.g., an entirely new set of dependent measures, additional trait measures prior to the critical thinking period that may have influenced online experience), the current study does not constitute a direct or “close” replication. Nor has it used revised procedures adopted by the original authors in including appropriate experimental controls and random assignment to condition. Given this, I am not sure the methodology warrants the causal conclusions drawn at present. If the authors were to replicate the current study in a well-powered sample with random assignment to either their experimental condition or an appropriately informative control group, and situate the results of both studies together more clearly in light of recent work on this topic, I would welcome that contribution to the literature.

·       With the help of the two reviewers’ comments and remarks we reworked our manuscript and added relevant details. We are convinced that this strengthened the overall contents of our submission and makes clear that we did not aim to conduct a direct replication of the Wilson et al. study. Instead, we considered further variables, such as the perception of time, in a condition of being alone in a room for a silent period of time, as to be of importance and interest for further investigations.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of “Just Think” – Students feel significantly more relaxed, less 
aroused, and in a better mood after a period of silence alone in a room [psych-497801]

This paper should be of interest to the readership of Psyche.  There are, however, a number of minor issues that I will raise in this review—and all of these need to be addressed.  As is usual with me, this is a signed review.  I will list the issues in order of my own reading.

1.  p. 3, lines 106-110:  The second sentence here contradicts the first.  Also:  surely spending the time with one’s thoughts when depressed can be problematic.  I would suggest fixing this paragraph with these comments in mind.

2.  p. 3, line 145:  Why ‘reaction’, and not simply emotional state?

3.  p. 4, lines 189-191:  How were these study aims presented to the participants?  What were the precise instructions given to them?  You should relate to the demand characteristics of this study.

Author Response

This paper should be of interest to the readership of Psyche.  There are, however, a number of minor issues that I will raise in this review—and all of these need to be addressed.  As is usual with me, this is a signed review.  I will list the issues in order of my own reading.

Thank you very much for your kind feedback on our manuscript.

1.  p. 3, lines 106-110:  The second sentence here contradicts the first.  Also:  surely spending the time with one’s thoughts when depressed can be problematic.  I would suggest fixing this paragraph with these comments in mind.

We changed the passage as follows in order to emphasize the contrasting aspects:

·       The idea of silence, Depth Relaxation Music Therapy (DRMT)/Hypnomusictherapy (HMT), and walking in nature is that spending time with one’s own thoughts can increase relaxation and enjoyment and have specific health-fostering effects. However, in other contexts, effects may be different as Killingsworth and Gilbert [12] concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind” (p. 932). They found correlations between negative moods, mind-wandering, and unhappiness.

2.  p. 3, line 145:  Why ‘reaction’, and not simply emotional state?

·       Why not “affective reaction”? We assume the emotional state to be a consequence of having to wait, thus a reaction. (see also p. 3, line 104)

3.  p. 4, lines 189-191:  How were these study aims presented to the participants?  What were the precise instructions given to them?  You should relate to the demand characteristics of this study.

·       This reviewer is right. We added the following instruction in the methods section. “Please spend the following time occupying yourself with your own thoughts and please stay seated and awake.”:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

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