A Peaceful Mind: How Dispositional Mindfulness is Related to Emotional Stability Over Time and Across Events. A peaceful mind: come la mindfulness disposizionale si associa a stabilità emotiva nel tempo e attraverso gli eventi

Emotional stability is an essential ingredient of long-term mental health. Building on the well-known link between dispositional mindfulness and well-being, this project investigated the role of diverse aspects of dispositional mindfulness in emotional stability. We hypothesized that people higher in dispositional mindfulness would display more stable emotions, as reflected by lower emotional reactivity to self-relevant events, flatter emotion trajectories, smaller effects of negative and positive events on negative and positive affect respectively, and lower emotional variability and instability. We systematically tested these hypotheses through one cross-sectional, three longitudinal, and one experience sampling studies, analyzing data with simple linear, multilevel, and multilevel growth regression models. Results supported our hypotheses, especially for negative emotions. Dispositional mindfulness was associated with lower negative emotions felt when thinking about a self-relevant negative or positive event, flatter negative affect trajectories, weaker relationships between intra-individual variations in negative events and negative affect, and lower emotional variability and instability for negative emotions. Analyses of specific facets of mindfulness revealed that these effects were due mostly to differences in awareness, nonjudgment, and nonreactivity to inner experience, and that nonjudgment and nonreactivity also moderated the effect of intra-individual variations in positive events on positive affect. Moreover, the relationship between these three aspects of dispositional mindfulness and life satisfaction was partly mediated by lower emotional variability. These findings provide a novel perspective on the link between dispositional mindfulness and well-being, suggesting that a fundamental benefit of dispositional mindfulness is living a life imbued with greater equanimity and emotional stability.