中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: This study investigates the relation of mindfulness to psychological flexibility. Mindfulness indicates living in the present without judgment. Psychological flexibility focuses on coping and emotion-regulation flexibility. Coping flexibility indicates the degree to which individuals are able to apply a problem-focused coping strategy in a controllable stressful situation, and an emotion-focused coping strategy in an uncontrollable stressful situation. Emotion regulation flexibility indicates the degree to which individuals can apply a distraction emotion-regulation strategy in facing a highly intensive negative emotional stimulus, and a reappraisal emotion-regulation strategy in facing a negative emotional stimulus of low intensity. Methods: In Study 1, 117 participants (mean age = 20.47 years, 57% female; recruited from 2012 April to June) completed a measure of mindfulness and coping flexibility tasks. In Study 2, 113 participants (mean age = 19.76 years, 43% female; recruited from 2012 October to December) completed a measure of mindfulness and emotion-regulation flexibility tasks. Results: The results revealed that high mindful individuals demonstrated better coping flexibility (Study 1) and emotion-regulation flexibility (Study 2). Low mindful individuals had an inconsistent profile both in use of coping strategies (Study 1) and emotion-regulation strategies (Study 2). Conclusions: Mindfulness is essential for psychological flexibility, and our studies demonstrated that high mindful individuals are better than low mindful individual on both coping and emotion regulation flexibility.