Balancing spontaneous and controlled thought: mind wandering, mindfulness, playfulness, and creativity in adolescence

This study investigated how daydreaming frequency, the emotional valence of mind wandering, mindfulness, and multiple facets of playfulness predict creativity across verbal, figural, and mathematical domains in a sample of Chilean high school students (N = 405). Participants completed self-report measures of attentional dispositions and playfulness, along with five creativity assessments targeting verbal and mathematical divergent thinking, verbal and figural remote associative processing, and figural product composition. A structural equation model controlling for gender and school revealed that daydreaming frequency was the trait most consistently related to creativity. Across four of the five measures-including verbal and figural remote associations, figural product composition, and mathematical divergent thinking-higher daydreaming frequency was associated with better performance, supporting the notion that spontaneous thought facilitates creative performance across several domains. In contrast, affectively valenced mind wandering showed negative associations with creativity: positive mind wandering was negatively related to both verbal creative tasks, and negative mind wandering was negatively associated with verbal divergent thinking. Mindfulness was positively associated with creative performance only in the figural product composition task, which required evaluating and integrating ideas. A statistically significant moderation effect was observed: mindfulness was positively associated with performance in this task when daydreaming was low, but at higher levels of daydreaming, the association reversed. Playfulness showed heterogeneous effects: intellectual playfulness was positively associated with verbal divergent thinking, whereas general and lighthearted playfulness were negatively associated with verbal and mathematical divergent thinking, respectively. Other-directed playfulness was positively linked to figural remote association performance. These results suggest that a disposition to mind wander may serve as a developmental scaffold for creativity and facilitate access to distant associations in tasks that require idea generation or remote association. A disposition toward mindful awareness may be beneficial for complex creative tasks. Future research on playfulness and creativity should focus on how intentionality and cognitive guidance shape creative processes, given that these qualities are more closely associated with intellectual playfulness. Implications for educational practice underscore the value of balancing opportunities for spontaneous thought with the development of mindful awareness during creative work.