Mental wandering as a mediating variable between unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation among university student

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Mental Health, Faculty of Education for Girls in Cairo - Al-Azhar University.

2 Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education for Girls in Cairo - Al-Azhar University.

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between mind-wandering and unrealistic academic entitlement among university students, as well as the relationship between unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation, and between mind-wandering and future orientation. Additionally, the study sought to explore differences in the study variables based on gender and academic specialization, as well as to investigate the mediating role of mind-wandering in the relationship between unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation among university students.
The study sample consisted of 352 male and female students from the Faculties of Education, Engineering, Science, and Humanities at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. The research utilized the following instruments: the Mind-Wandering Scale, the Unrealistic Academic Entitlement Scale, and the Future Orientation Scale (developed by the researchers).
The results revealed a statistically significant positive correlation between mind-wandering and unrealistic academic entitlement, as well as between unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation. In contrast, a statistically significant negative correlation was found between mind-wandering and future orientation.
Additionally, the study identified statistically significant differences in unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation based on gender, favoring male students. However, no statistically significant differences were found in mind-wandering based on gender. Furthermore, the results indicated no significant differences in any of the three study variables based on academic specialization.
Finally, the results demonstrated that mind-wandering partially mediates the relationship between unrealistic academic entitlement and future orientation among university students.

Keywords

References

Ackerson, C. J. (2019). Parenting styles and academic entitlement in the higher education classroom (Doctoral dissertation). Texas A&M University-Commerce.
Achacoso, M. V. (2002). What do you mean my grade is not an A? An investigation of academic entitlement, causal attributions, and self-regulation in college students (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Texas at Austin.
Alharbi, H. H. (2024). The relative contribution of future orientation in predicting patterns of academic identity among secondary school female students in Makkah Al-Mukarramah. College of Education Journal, Umm Al-Qura University, 16(1), 164-178.
Allport, G. W. (1983). Becoming: Basic considerations for a psychology of personality.Yale University Press.
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.978089042559
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1604-1611.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman.
Barton, A. L., & Kirtley, M. S. (2012). Gender differences in the relationships among parenting styles and college student mental health. Journal of American College Health, 60(1), 21-26.
Barton, A. L., & Hirsch, J. K. (2016). Permissive parenting and mental health in college students: Mediating effects of academic entitlement. Journal of American College Health, 64(1), 1–8.
Belardi, A., Chaieb, L., Rey-Mermet, A., Mormann, F., Rothen, N., Fell, J., & Reber, T. P. (2022). On the relationship between mind wandering and mindfulness. Scientific Reports, 12(1), Article 7755.
Boswell, S. (2012). I deserve success: Academic entitlement attitudes and their relationships with course self-efficacy, social networking, and demographic variables. Social Psychology of Education, 15(3), 353-365.
Brosowsky, N. P., DeGutis, J., Esterman, M., Smilek, D., & Seli, P. (2023). Mind wandering, motivation, and task performance over time: Evidence that motivation insulates people from the negative effects of mind wandering. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 10(4), 475–486
Campbell, W., Bonacci, A., Shelton, J., Exline, J., & Bushman, B. (2004). Psychological entitlement: Interpersonal consequences and validation of a self-report measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83(1), 29-45.
Cho, Y. H., & Kapur, M. (2015). Authentic problem solving and learning in the 21st century: Perspectives from Singapore and beyond. Springer.
Chowning, K., & Campbell, J. (2009). Development and validation of a measure of academic entitlement: Individual differences in students’ externalized responsibility and entitled expectations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(4), 982–997.
Christoff, K., Gordon, A. M., Smallwood, J., Smith, R., & Schooler, J. W. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(11), 718-731.
Elias, R. (2017). Academic entitlement and its relationship with perception of cheating ethics. Journal of Education for Business, 92(4), 194-199.

Deng, Y. Q., Shi, G., Zhang, B., Zheng, X., Liu, Y., Zhou, C., & Wang, X. (2022). The effect of mind wandering on cognitive flexibility is mediated by boredom. Acta Psychologica, 231, 103789.
Engen, H. G., & Anderson, M. C. (2018). Memory control: A fundamental mechanism of emotion regulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(11), 982–995,
Entwistle, N. (2009). Teaching for understanding at university: Deep approaches and distinctive ways of thinking. Palgrave Macmillanind wandering on cognitive flexibility is mediated by boredom. Acta Psychologica, 231, 103789.
Estes, P. (2014). Exploring the correlates of academic entitlement. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.21819.92969.
Fletcher, K., Pierson, E., Neumeister, N., & Finch, H. (2020). Overparenting and perfectionistic concerns predict academic entitlement in young adults. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 29, 348-357.
Foley, M. (2020). Academic incivility: Can the dark triad personality traits predict academic entitlement? (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University). Walden University ScholarWorks.
Frey, Marc Philip,(2015) "Academic Entitlement, Student Motivation, and Academic Outcomes" . Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5636
Fromuth, M. E., Bass, J. E., Kelly, D. B., Davis, T. L., & Chan, K. L. (2019). Academic entitlement: Its relationship with academic behaviors and attitudes. Social Psychology of Education: An International Journal, 22(5), 1153-1167.
Forster, S., & Lavie, N. (2009). Harnessing the wandering mind: The role of perceptual load. Cognition, 111(3), 345-355.
Glick, D. M., Millstein, D. J., & Orsillo, S. M. (2014). A preliminary investigation of the role of psychological inflexibility in academic procrastination. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 3(2), 81–88.
Greenberger, E., Lessard, J., Chen, C., & Farruggia, S. (2008). Self-entitled college students: Contributions of personality, parenting, and motivational factors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 37(10), 1193-1204.
Gusnard, D. A., & Raichle, M. E. (2001). Searching for a baseline: Functional imaging and the resting human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2(10), 685–694.
Hergenhahn, B. R. (1980). An introduction to theories of personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Husman, J., & Shell, D. F. (2008). Beliefs and perceptions about the future: A measurement of future time perspective. Learning and Individual Differences, 18(2), 166–175.
Irving, Z., & Glasser, A. (2019). Mind-wandering: A philosophical guide. Philosophy Compass, 14(1), e12644
Jackson, D. L., Frey, M. P., McLellan, C., Rauti, C. M., Lamborn, P. B., & Singleton-Jackson, J. A. (2020). I deserve more A’s: A report on the development of a measure of academic entitlement. PLoS ONE, 15(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239721
Jeffres, M., Barclay, S., & Stolte, S. (2014). Academic entitlement and academic performance in graduating pharmacy students. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 78(6), 1-9.
Johnson, S., Blum, R., & Cheng, T. (2017). Future orientation: A construct with implications for adolescent health and wellbeing. International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, 26(4), 4
 
Jones, Samantha K., "Academic Entitlement and the Association of Attitude toward Learning and Perseverance for Goals, and Identity Processes." (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 6759–468.
Jordan, P., Ramsay, S., & Westerlaken, K. (2017). A review of entitlement: Implications for
workplace research. Organizational Psychology Review, 7(2), 122–142.
Ju, Y.-J., & Lien, Y.-W. (2018). Who is prone to wander and when? Examining an integrative effect of working memory capacity and mindfulness trait on mind wandering under different task loads. Consciousness and Cognition, 63, 1–10.
Kawagoe, T., Onoda, K., & Yamaguchi, S. (2020). The association of motivation with mind wandering in trait and state levels. PloS one, 15(8), e023746
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.
Kiera, C., Melissa, D., & Rajini, N. (2022). Future orientation and Latinx adolescent development: A scoping review. Adolescent Research Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-022-00190-9
Kohn, A. (2004). Punished by rewards. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Kopp, J., & Finney, S. (2013). Linking academic entitlement and student incivility using latent means modeling. The Journal of Experimental Education, 81(3), 322-336.
Kurtyilmaz, Y. (2019). Adaptation of academic entitlement questionnaire. Anadolu Journal of Educational Sciences International, 9(2), 314–351.
Lalot, F., Abrams, D., Sanna, A., & Maio, G. R. (2021). Being future-conscious during a global crisis: The protective effect of heightened futures consciousness in the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and Individual Differences, 178, 110862
Lessard, J., Greenberger, E., Chen, C., & Farruggia, S. (2011). Are youths’ feelings of entitlement always “bad”? Evidence for a distinction between exploitive and non-exploitive dimensions of entitlement. Journal of Adolescence, 34(3), 521–529.
Londeree, A. (2015). Mindfulness and mind-wandering in older adults: Implications for behavioral performance (Master’s thesis). University of Louisville. Retrieved from. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301749864
Luo, Y., Zhu, R., Ju, E., & You, X. (2016). Validation of the Chinese version of the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire (MWQ) and the mediating role of self-esteem in the relationship between mind-wandering and life satisfaction for adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences, 92, 118–122.
Marchetti, I., Koster, E. H. W., Klinger, E., & Alloy, L. B. (2016). The role of rumination in depressive disorders: A review and integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 55, 1–18,
McLelan, C. K., & Jackson, D. L. (2017). Personality, self-regulated learning, and academic entitlement. Social Psychology of Education, 20(2), 159–178.
Miller Henningsen, M. L., Valde, K. S., Bryan, F. J., & Babin, S. (2025). Academic entitlement and expectations: Instructor responses to student cell phone use in class. Southern Communication Journal, 1–19.
Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776-781.
Murray, S., Liang, N., Brosowsky, N., & Seli, P. (2021). What are the benefits of mind wandering to creativity? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12, 1-7.
McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2010). Does mind wandering reflect executive function or executive failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 188–197.
McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2012). Why does working memory capacity predict variation in mind-wandering? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(3), 818-831.
Oettingen, G., &Schworer,B.(2013).Mind wandering via mental contrasting as a tool for behavior change. Frontiers in Psychology,4, 1-5.
Pawlak, S., & Moustafa, A. (2023). Systematic review of the impact of future-oriented thinking on . cademic outcomes. Educational Psychology, 14, 12-32.
Pailotti, M., Al Ghazo, R., & Al Shamsi, S. (2021). Academic entitlement amid social change in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-05-2021-0168
Peirone, A., & Maticka-Tyndale, E. (2017). "I bought my degree, now I want my job": Is academic entitlement related to prospective workplace entitlement? Innovative Higher Education, 42(1), 3–18.
Poerio, G. L., Totterdell, P., & Miles, E. (2013). Mind-wandering and negative mood: Does one thing really lead to another? Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1412-1421.
Racy, F., & Morin, A. (2024). Relationships between self-talk, inner speech, mind wandering, mindfulness, self-concept clarity, and self-regulation in university students. Behavioral Sciences, 15(14), 55.
Randall, J. G., Beier, M. E., & Villado, A. J. (2019). Multiple routes to mind wandering: Predicting mind wandering with resource theories. Consciousness and Cognition, 67, 26-43.
Randall, J. G., Oswald, F. L., & Beier, M. E. (2014). Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: . A theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1411–1431.
Reichle, E., & Halpern, D. (2004). Zoning out while reading: Evidence for dissociation between experience and meta-consciousness. In D. T. Levin (Ed.), Thinking and seeing: Visual metacognition in adults and children (pp. 203–226). MIT Press.
Reysen, R. H. (2013). The relationship between academic entitlement, academic performance, and satisfaction with life in a college student population (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Mississippi.
Reysen, R. H., Degges-White, S., & Reysen, M. B. (2020). Exploring the interrelationships among academic entitlement, academic performance, and satisfaction with life in a college student sample. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 22(2), 186–204.

Rocco, S., Costanza, S., Angela, C., & Stefano, B. (2022). Future orientation and symptoms of anxiety and depression in Italian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of resilience and the perceived threat of COVID-19. Healthcare, 10(6), 970
Rose, K., & Anastasio, P. (2014). Entitlement is about “others,” narcissism is not: Relations to so.
ciotropic and autonomous interpersonal styles. Personality and Individual Differences, 59, 50–53.
Ruby, F. J. M., Smallwood, J., Engen, H., & Singer, T. (2013). How self-generated thought shapes mood—The relation between mind-wandering and mood depends on the socio-temporal content of thoughts. PLoS ONE, 8(10), e77554.
Skinner, A. T., Çiftçi, L., Jones, S., Klotz, E., Ondrušková, T., Lansford, J. E., Alampay, L. P., Al-Hassan, S. M., Bacchini, D., & Bornstein, M. H. (2022). Adolescent positivity and future orientation, parental psychological control, and young adult internalising behaviours during COVID-19 in nine countries. Social Sciences, 11(3), 75.
Schooler, J. (2013). Penetrating the fog of the decoupled mind: The effects of alienation in the sustained attention to response task. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 67(1), 32-40.
Seli, P., Konishi, M., Risko, E. F., & Smilek, D. (2018). The role of task difficulty in theoretical accounts of mind wandering. Consciousness and Cognition, 65, 255-262.
Seli, P., Schacter, D. L., Risko, E. F., & et al. (2019). Increasing participant motivation reduces rates of intentional and unintentional mind wandering. Psychological Research, 83(5), 1057–1069
Sessoms, J., Finney, S., & Kopp, J. (2016). Does the measurement or magnitude of academic entitlement change over time? Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 49, 243-257.
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 946-956.
Smallwood, J. (2013). Distinguishing how from why the mind wanders: A process–occurrence framework for self-generated mental activity. Psychological Bulletin, 139(3), 519–535.56.
Smallwood, J., & Andrews-Hanna, J. (2013). Not all minds that wander are lost: The importance of a balanced perspective on the mind-wandering state. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 441.
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: Empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 66(1), 487–518
Smallwood, J., O'Connor, R., Sudbery, M., & Schooler, J. W. (2007). Counting the cost of an absent mind: Mind wandering as an underrecognized influence on educational performance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 230-2368.
Stawarczyk, D., Majerus, S., Maquet, P., & D'Argembeau, A. (2011). Neural correlates of ongoing conscious experience: Both task-unrelatedness and stimulus-independence are related to default network activity. PLoS ONE, 6(2), e16997,
Sohr, S., & Boswell, S. (2015). Predicting academic entitlement in undergraduates. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 27(2), 183-193.
Tomlinson, E. (2013). An integrative model of entitlement beliefs. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 25(2), 67–87.
Trigueros, R., Aguilar-Parra, J. M., Álvarez, J. F., & Cangas, A. J. (2019). Adaptation and validation of the mind-wandering questionnaire (MWQ) in physical education classes and analysis of its role as mediator between teacher and anxiety. Sustainability, 11(18)
Turnipseed, D. L., & Cohen, S. R. (2015). Academic entitlement and socially aversive personalities: Do the Dark Triad predict academic entitlement? Personality and Individual Differences, 82, 72-75.
Twenge, J. (2013). The evidence for Generation Me and against Generation We. State of the Field, 1(1), 11-16.
Unsworth, N., & Robison, M. K. (2018). Tracking arousal state and mind wandering with pupillometry. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 18(4), 638–664.
Wadhwani, A. (2017). Mind wandering and creativity (Bachelor’s thesis). Faculty of Humanities, Tilburg University, Tilbur.
Wang, Y., Xu, W., Zhuang, C., & Liu, X. (2017). Does mind wandering mediate the association between mindfulness and negative mood? A preliminary study. Psychological Reports, 120(1), 118–129.
Williams, K. J., Lee, K. E., Hartig, T., Sargent, L. D., Williams, N. S., & Johnson, K. A. (2018). Conceptualizing creativity benefits of nature experience: Attention restoration and mind wandering as complementary processes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 59, 36-45.
Zhu, L., Anagondahalli, D., & Yilmaz, G. (2019). Customers or academic trainees? An experimental investigation to reduce academic entitlement in the college classroom. Communication Studies, 70(4), 507-519

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics