Abstract
Research shows greater mindfulness is associated with less negative affect and more positive affect. Fewer studies have examined the mediating psychological processes linking mindfulness to these outcomes in adolescents. This three-wave, prospective longitudinal study examines rumination—the tendency to engage in repetitive and negative self-focused thinking—as one potential explanatory process. High school students (N = 599, Mage = 16.3 years; 49% girls) completed a short-form version of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, in addition to self-report measures of rumination and negative and positive affect three times over the course of a school year. Autoregressive, cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, prospective associations between mindfulness, rumination, and negative and positive affect, while accounting for prior levels of each construct, within-wave covariances, and gender and grade level. The results showed that the nonjudgment mindfulness facet (and the total mindfulness score) predicted cross-wave reductions in rumination, that in turn predicted cross-wave reductions in negative affect. No evidence for mediation was found for positive affect, or for any of the other mindfulness facets (describe, acting with awareness, and nonreactivity). This study provides suggestive evidence that individual differences in mindfulness, and in particular nonjudgmental acceptance, prospectively predict less negative affect through lower rumination.
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Notes
Data from this project have been used in other papers (Abujaradeh et al. 2020; Colaianne et al. 2020), including the validation study of the short-form Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire employed in this analysis. The hypothesis tested here is novel and does not overlap with other papers drawn from this dataset.
As a robustness check, we reran the main analyses excluding the 8 (1.3%) students who did not provide at least one full wave of data during the study. Results of this reanalysis were substantively the same as those using the full sample.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the school administration and teachers and all the participating students, as well as Hannah M. Fiore who helped with data collection.
Authors’ Contributions
M.J.T. analyzed data and interpreted results and drafted paper under the supervision of B.M.G.; B.A.C. participated in the design of the study, assisted with data analysis, and provided critical revisions to the paper; R.W.R. participated in the design of the study, assisted with executing the study, and provided critical revisions to the paper; B.M.G. designed the study, supervised execution of the study, supervised data analysis and interpretation of the results, and supervised paper preparation. All authors read and approved the final paper.
Funding
The research reported here was supported by start-up funding from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education to the last author and the Edna Bennett Pierce endowed chair in Care and Compassion at The Pennsylvania State University held by the third author.
Data Sharing and Declaration
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository, https://osf.io/utqza/.
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Tumminia, M.J., Colaianne, B.A., Roeser, R.W. et al. How is Mindfulness Linked to Negative and Positive Affect? Rumination as an Explanatory Process in a Prospective Longitudinal Study of Adolescents. J Youth Adolescence 49, 2136–2148 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01238-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01238-6