Moderating Impact of Dispositional Mindfulness in the Relationship Between Future Expectancies and Psychological Well-Being.

Dispositional mindfulness—the tendency to be aware and nonjudgmental of present-moment experience—may influence how vividly people imagine future events and how those images relate to distress. In two studies with healthy adults, no link was found between mindfulness facets and perceived risk of positive or negative future events. However, the nonreactivity facet of mindfulness moderated the connection between vividness of negative mental imagery and psychological distress: among those with higher nonreactivity, the usual association between vivid negative imagery and distress was weaker. This suggests that being nonreactive to inner experience can buffer the emotional impact of vivid negative future imaginings, pointing to a potential mechanism for mindfulness-based interventions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

ObjectivesMindfulness has been studied under cultivated or dispositional divisions where the latter has strong implications for psychological well-being in meditators and non-meditators alike. In addition, future expectations, or prospections, regarding the occurrence of important events in a person's future have recently been hypothesized to be the main cause behind symptoms of major depression. There is, however, a lack of empirical research looking at possible links between dispositional mindfulness, as understood in its facet structure, and future expectations as understood via perceived risk of occurrence and vividness of mental imagery when prompted to imagine a given list of positive and negative prospective event item lists. Therefore, this research aimed at examining how dispositional mindfulness may be related to probabilistic risk assessments of positive and negative future events (Stage I); and how mental imagery vividness may be moderated by mindfulness facets (Stage II).MethodsBoth stages included healthy participants and incorporated the PROCESS macro for moderated regression analysis done with the SPSS software. Stage I included 204 voluntary college students, and Stage II was conducted online with a public sample of 110 adults.ResultsAlthough no interaction effect was found in Stage I, nonreactivity to inner experience facet of dispositional mindfulness moderated the relationship between negative imagery vividness and psychological distress in Stage II (F(1,103) = 4.00, R2 change=.018, p <.05).ConclusionsThis is a novel finding that could inform a future line of research looking into the relationship between prospection and mindfulness, holding a potential for informing research on mindfulness-based interventions.