Age and socioeconomic differences in coping with home stressors: A daily diary study of mindfulness and anticipatory coping

Abstract

Anticipatory coping involves efforts to reduce the consequences of upcoming, future stressors, but the individual and contextual predictors of anticipatory coping are not well understood. The current study focuses on individual differences in age and income and contextual fluctuations in mindfulness (present-centered thinking) to predict daily fluctuations in anticipatory coping with future home-related stressors. In the Mindfulness and Anticipatory Coping Everyday study, 223 adults (116 aged 60–90, 107 aged 18–36) completed an online questionnaire for nine consecutive days via Qualtrics, providing demographic information on Day 1. For the subsequent 8 days, participants reported mindfulness and anticipatory coping. Multilevel models revealed that within-person increases in daily mindfulness were related to decreases in daily anticipatory coping among younger adults and higher income older adults. This research provides evidence of tension between mindfulness and future-oriented coping and shows how this depends on one's life stage and access to resources.