Concurrent Relations Between Mindful Attention and Awareness and Psychopathology Among Trauma-Exposed Adults

Abstract

This study evaluated the concurrent associations between mindful attention and awareness and psychopathology symptoms among adults exposed to trauma. Participants included 76 adults (35 women; Mage = 30.0 years, SD = 12.5) who reported experiencing one or more traumatic events. As hypothesized, levels of mindful attention and awareness were significantly negatively associated with levels of posttraumatic stress symptom severity, psychiatric multimorbidity, anxious arousal, and anhedonic depression symptoms, beyond the large, positive effect of number of traumatic event types. In addition, statistical evaluation of the phenomenological pattern of these associations showed that high levels of mindfulness exclusively co-occurred with low levels of psychopathology symptoms or high rates of mental health; whereas low levels of mindfulness did not similarly exclusively co-occur with either low or high levels of psychopathology symptoms but rather co-occurred with a broad range of symptom levels. Findings are conceptualized in terms of transdiagnostic resilience and discussed in regard to extant empirical and theoretical work.