Over the last decades, mindfulness has received much attention in the research literature. Mindfulness can be conceptualized as a receptive attention to and awareness of internal and external experiences as they occur (Brown and Ryan, 2003 and Brown et al., 2007). Although levels of mindfulness can be increased through meditation or mindfulness-based training (e.g., Baer et al., 2008 and Falkenstrom, 2010), mindfulness may also be conceptualized as a psychological trait that refers to the tendency to be mindful in everyday life (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Mindfulness has been shown to have positive effects on mental health and psychological well-being (e.g., general distress, depression, anxiety), physical health (e.g., chronic pain), and quality of intimate relationships, whether based on a trait approach or an invention approach (Baer, 2003, Brown and Ryan, 2003, Brown et al., 2007, Feldman et al., 2007 and Grossman et al., 2004). The present study mainly focused on the trait approach and used a self-report measure to assess dispositional mindfulness.
There is a substantial body of research investigating the relationship between mindfulness and perceived stress. Several studies of mindfulness to date have reported negative correlations between self-reported mindfulness and perceived stress (Black et al., 2012, Bränström et al., 2011, Gard et al., 2012 and Weinstein et al., 2009). With an increase in mindfulness as a result of interventions, e.g., Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) intervention, perceived stress tended to decrease (e.g., Baer et al., 2012, Carmody et al., 2009, Chu, 2010 and Oman et al., 2006).
Although the negative relationship between mindfulness and perceived stress has been well established, the mechanisms that might account for this relationship are still unclear. Some researchers (Schutte & Malouff, 2011) have asserted that mindfulness may encourage individuals to develop better emotional intelligence (EI) which in turn lead to higher well-being. Petrides, Pita, and Kokkinaki (2007) proposed two different conceptualization of EI, i.e., trait EI and ability EI. Ability EI is defined as a set of interrelated skills that can be classified within the four dimensions: the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Trait EI, by contrast, is conceptualized as a trait which refers to “a constellation of behavioral dispositions and emotional self-perceptions located at the lower-levels of personality hierarchies” (Petrides et al., 2007). There is some evidence to support the hypothesis. For example, people with high levels of mindfulness are likely to perceive greater EI (e.g., Baer et al., 2004, Baer et al., 2006, Brown and Ryan, 2003, Schutte and Malouff, 2011, Sinclair and Feigenbaum, 2012 and Snowden et al., 2015); People with high EI report less perceived stress (e.g., Extremera et al., 2007, Gohm et al., 2005, Mikolajczak et al., 2012 and Vesely et al., 2013). Thus, we predicted trait would mediate the association between mindfulness and perceived stress.
To our knowledge, two studies have shown that EI acts as a mediator of the association between mindfulness and subjective well-being (Schutte and Malouff, 2011 and Wang and Kong, 2013), but some questions still remain unanswered. One the one hand, although these two studies have demonstrated the mediating role of EI between EI and subjective well-being, as Schutte and Malouff (2011) pointed out, it is necessary to explore the possible mediating role of EI in the relationship between mindfulness and other variables such as stress. On the other hand, because EI is multi-dimensional construct (Mayer & Salovey, 1997), which aspects of EI play a more important role in the relationship between mindfulness and perceived stress is unclear. Some researchers have pointed out mindfulness may encourage the development of regulation of emotion (Chambers et al., 2009 and Koole, 2009). Evidence from fMRI studies shows that brain regions involved in attentional and emotion regulation processes, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, play a role in mindfulness (Frewen et al., 2010). Thus, we predicted that only some aspects of EI (e.g., regulation of emotion) might mediate the mindfulness- perceived stress relationship.
The present study expands the existing research in several ways. First, this study set out first to examine the mediating effect of EI on the link between mindfulness and perceived stress, which would extend our comprehensive understanding of the mechanism whereby mindfulness and perceived stress are connected. Second, we determined which components of EI play a more prominent role in this association via the methods comparing specific indirect effects in multiple mediator models because Preacher and Hayes (2008) asserted that significance of the total indirect effect was not a necessary precondition for significant specific indirect effects in multiple mediator models.
