ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a brief history of modern investigation of thought flow, from the systematic introspective analysis of daydreaming by Varendonck (1921), to its placement on a modern behavior-scientific foundation by Singer (1966), to work on response organization, dreaming, and cognitive interference, and finally to its analysis within currentconcerns theory. Evidence confirms that concerns (latent time-binding states that extend from the initiation of commitment to a goal pursuit to its termination) account for the control of attention, perception, and moment-to-moment changes in thought content through focus on, and processing of, cues related to current goal pursuits. The effects, which appear to be automatic and perhaps inexorable, may be mediated by emotional responses potentiated by the concerns. This chapter further describes both intraindividual dimensions and properties of thought flow assessed with thought-sampling methods, and individual differences in thought flow assessed with questionnaires.
