Abstract

Objective: Maladaptive daydreaming is described as a mental health condition characterized by prolonged, excessive daydreaming sessions involving complex and vivid imaginary scenarios. Maladaptive daydreaming sessions are often accompanied by kinesthetic and repetitive movements and/or musical stimuli. As in other psychopathologies, maladaptive daydreaming has distressing aspects—such as time consumption, stigmatization, and addiction— that make it qualitatively different from regular mind wandering. It has high rates of comorbidity with other psychopathologies, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorders, and dissociative disorders. Currently, maladaptive daydreaming is proposed to be categorized as a dissociative disorder. Although it has recently started to attract research interest, research addressing its cognitive aspects is scarce. To fill this gap in the literature, the aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between maladaptive daydreaming and episodic memory.

Methods: One hundred and ninety-eight (Mage=22.39, SDage=3.39, 72.22% female) participants were recruited through snowball sampling. They were expected to complete the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS-16 TR), the Positivity and Negativity Affect Scale (PANAS), and the episodic memory task online via Qualtrics. The episodic memory task is composed of encoding, recall, and recognition phases. In the encoding phase, participants were expected to learn 44 word pairs. In the recall phase, one word from each pair was presented in a random order, and participants were expected to remember the missing word and type it. In the recognition phase, in a forced-choice question format, the correct word with three alternatives was presented for each word pair that could not be correctly recalled by participants in the recall phase. Participants were expected to select the correct choice.

Results: In line with the previous research, a positive correlation was found between maladaptive daydreaming score and depression score, r(198) = .31, p < .001. Partial Pearson’s correlation analyses with the depression score as a covariate demonstrated no significant correlation between maladaptive daydreaming score, and recall and recognition performance, r(195) = .09, p = .21; r(195) = .02, p =.79 respectively. In addition, no significant partial correlation was observed between the maladaptive daydreaming score and the total accuracy score, r(195) = .08, p =.24.

Conclusion: While a high comorbidity has been found between maladaptive daydreaming and depression, results suggest that there was no relationship between maladaptive daydreaming and episodic memory. The findings were discussed in terms of the regularity of daydreaming, its comorbidity with depression, and the new acknowledgment of maladaptive daydreaming as a mental health condition.

Key words: Depression, Episodic memory, Maladaptive Daydreaming