Abstract
The successful outcomes of mindfulness derived interventions are well established and it has been suggested that cognitive factors may be responsible for the therapeutic benefits. With a sample of 296 individuals, we examined the mediating role of adaptive (i.e., effortful control) and maladaptive cognitive factors (i.e., repetitive negative thinking) in the relationship between the tendency to act mindfully and internalized and externalized problems, after controlling for confounding demographic and personal variables. We hypothesized that mindfulness would be positively related to effortful control, while inversely related to repetitive negative thinking. Furthermore, effortful control would be inversely related to internalized and externalized problems, while repetitive negative thinking would be positively related to these problems. Our results indicated that the original model could be improved by adding a path between mindfulness and internalized problems and by being more parsimonious. The final model provided an adequate fit for the data. Our findings are in line with theoretical models of mindfulness, which conceive its benefits in terms of cognitive process and self-regulation.
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Funding
This study was partly funded by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research from our institution (grant number AY0309).
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study
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This manuscript is based on data also used in a doctoral dissertation. Some of the data from this paper were previously presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association in Victoria (June 2016).
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Maltais, M., Bouchard, G. & Saint-Aubin, J. Mechanisms of Mindfulness: the Mediating Roles of Adaptive and Maladaptive Cognitive Factors. Curr Psychol 38, 846–854 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9665-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9665-x