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Background and Objectives: Affect tolerance factors, including anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and emotional distress tolerance, have been implicated in the exacerbation of health anxiety. Therefore, identifying methods to improve affect tolerance in health anxious populations is imperative. Despite the link between mindfulness and greater affect tolerance in non-clinical populations, no work has examined the role of mindfulness skills in terms of affect tolerance among individuals with elevated health anxiety. The aim of the current study was to examine the unique contribution of mindfulness skills in terms of distress tolerance, anxiety sensitivity, and intolerance of uncertainty.Methods: Participants were 218 undergraduates with clinically elevated levels of health anxiety (75.7% female; Mage = 19.53, SD = 3.16, Range = 18–45) who completed self-report measures for course credit.Results: Findings indicated that, after controlling for theoretically relevant covariates, greater acting with awareness, non-judgment, and non-reactivity were uniquely associated with greater distress tolerance, and greater non-reactivity was associated with lower levels of intolerance of uncertainty. Though none of the mindfulness skills emerged as specific individual predictors of anxiety sensitivity, these skills collectively accounted for unique variance in anxiety sensitivity.Conclusions: These findings suggest that mindfulness skills may be helpful in targeting affect tolerance factors among individuals with elevated health anxiety.
This investigation evaluated the role of mindfulness‐based attention in concurrently predicting anxiety and depressive symptomatology and perceived health functioning in a community sample of 170 young adults (95 females; mean age (Mage) = 22.2 years, SD = 7.6). Partially consistent with prediction, results indicated that, relative to negative and positive affectivity and emotional expression and processing associated with approach‐oriented coping, mindfulness‐based attention incrementally predicted anhedonic depressive, but not anxious arousal, symptoms. Additionally, consistent with prediction, mindfulness‐based attention demonstrated incremental validity in relation to perceived health, and the degree of impairment of health in terms of physical and mental functioning. Results are discussed in relation to the construct development of mindfulness‐based attention, and specifically, the role(s) of this factor in emotional and physical health processes.
Health anxiety is characterized by the misinterpretation of body sensations as signs of an illness, leading to health-related worry and increased healthcare utilization. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions in the treatment of severe health anxiety, yet mechanisms of this association remain unexplored. Therefore, the present investigation sought to examine the indirect effect of mindfulness on health anxiety through intolerance of uncertainty (IU) or fear of the unknown. Undergraduate psychology students completed a series of online self-report measures for course credit. Bias-corrected bootstrapping (k = 10,000 samples) was used to generate a 95 % confidence interval to test the significance of the indirect effect. There was a significant indirect effect of greater levels of mindfulness on lower levels of health anxiety through decreases in intolerance of uncertainty. Higher levels of mindfulness may lead internal experiences to be perceived as less threatening, thereby increasing one’s ability to tolerate uncertainty and decreasing the need to worry and engage in safety behaviors that maintain health anxiety.
We examined coping self-efficacy as one potential mediator of the relationship between four specific mindfulness skills (observing, describing, acting with awareness, and accepting without judgment) and emotion regulation difficulties. Participants were 180 undergraduate students (M age = 21.13; 71 % female; 82 % Caucasian) who completed self-report measures for course credit. Pearson correlations, independent samples t test, and ANOVAs were used to examine bivariate relationships between study variables. Simple mediation was examined in a path analysis framework by testing the indirect effect of mindfulness skills on emotion regulation difficulties through coping self-efficacy. Results indicated that a greater use of describing, acting with awareness, and accepting without judgment were associated with greater coping self-efficacy, and coping self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between each of those skills and emotion regulation difficulties (indirect effects: b weight = −0.26 to −0.29, p < 0.01). The mindfulness skill of observing was not related to coping self-efficacy or emotion regulation difficulties. Findings suggest that coping self-efficacy partially explains the relationships between mindfulness and emotion regulation difficulties. Clinicians administering mindfulness-based interventions should be aware of the role of coping self-efficacy in the relationship between mindfulness and emotion regulation.
BACKGROUND:The aim of the current study was to examine the associations between the specific mindfulness skills of observing, describing, awareness, nonjudgment, and nonreactivity in terms of anxiety sensitivity (AS), distress tolerance (DT), and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) among college students with problematic alcohol use.
METHODS:
Participants were 202 (69.3% male; Mage = 18.96, SD = 2.24, range = 18-45 years) undergraduate college students with problematic alcohol use who completed self-report measures for course credit.
RESULTS:
Results indicated that after controlling for the effects of gender, smoking status, marijuana use status, and negative affectivity, greater use of the mindfulness skill of observing was associated with higher AS, greater describing was associated with lower AS and higher DT, greater nonjudgment was associated with lower AS and IU and higher DT, and greater nonreactivity was associated with increased DT. Awareness did not significantly predict any of the examined risk factors.
CONCLUSIONS:
These results suggest that specific mindfulness skills are associated with a greater tolerance of physiological, emotional, and uncertain states. An important next step will be to examine whether mindfulness skills are associated with decreased problematic alcohol use due to improvements in these anxiety-related risk factors.