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Negative emotional reactivity as measured by neuroticism has been shown to be an important risk factor for the development of depressive symptoms. This study investigated whether the ability to be mindful can protect against the negative effects of this temperamental vulnerability. An English community sample of N = 144 individuals who had completed a neuroticism questionnaire six years previously were assessed for current depressive symptoms and dispositional levels of mindfulness at points of assessment approximately one year apart. Dispositional mindfulness moderated the relation between neuroticism and current depressive symptoms: Neuroticism was significantly related to depression in those with low to medium levels of dispositional mindfulness but not in those with relatively high levels of mindfulness. Further analyzes focusing on particular mindfulness skills indicated that this effect was carried mostly by the ability to describe inner experience. The results suggest that dispositional mindfulness and particularly the ability to describe inner experience are helpful in dealing with negative emotional reactivity in a way that reduces the likelihood of depressive symptoms to develop.

Neuroticism, a stable temperament that arises early in life, is one of the best-established vulnerability factors for depression (Kotov, Gamez, Schmidt, & Watson, 2010). High levels of neuroticism are associated with an increased overall risk of depression (e.g. Kendler, Gatz, Gardner, & Pedersen, 2006), an increased likelihood that occurrence of stressful life events will lead into depressive disorder (Ormel, Oldehinkel, & Brilman, 2001), and a more protracted course in those who have become depressed (Hirschfeld, Klerman, & Andreasen, 1986). Neuroticism is a complex construct that includes several different traits and facets (see Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985), including thinking styles such as being “irrational”, and denotes an increased general tendency towards negative emotional reactivity and arousal. There is evidence that the relation between neuroticism and depressive symptoms is mediated by ruminative tendencies and increased cognitive reactivity, which is defined as the tendency for negative thinking to become triggered through only subtle changes in mood (Barnhofer and Chittka, 2010 and Roelofs et al., 2008). Ruminative tendencies and cognitive reactivity both play an important role in the recurrence and maintenance of depressive symptoms and are therefore important targets for preventative interventions (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008 and Scher et al., 2005). Recently interest has increased in the use of training in mindfulness meditation as a way of addressing these factors. Mindfulness has been described as the ability to maintain awareness moment by moment in an open and acceptant way (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). Importantly for clinical care, training in mindfulness can help individuals become better able to identify and disengage from maladaptive patterns of responding and thus prevent downward spirals of negative mood and thinking (e.g. Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002). Other research on mindfulness-based interventions lends further support: In those who are at risk for depression, intensive training in mindfulness reduces ruminative tendencies (Ramel, Goldin, Carmona, & McQuaid, 2004) and the negative effects of cognitive reactivity (Kuyken et al., 2010). Rumination and cognitive reactivity are processes that are high in people who are high in neuroticism, so if mindfulness can reduce these processes, it seems plausible that mindfulness is a skill that can help to prevent neuroticism from translating into depressive symptoms. Thus, delineating such effects would be helpful in understanding how the negative emotional outcomes of neuroticism can be prevented. This would be important for the prevention of depression, as well as the broad range of emotional disorders given that neuroticism accounts for a significant amount of common variance across the mood and anxiety disorders (Griffith et al., 2010). Mindfulness-based interventions are now increasingly being adapted for the whole spectrum of these disorders (Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010) and demonstrating the effects on global vulnerability factors would be an important step in justifying such broadening of application. Clinical applications focus on mindfulness as a trainable skill, but it can also be conceptualized as a dispositional variable that can be assessed using self-report questionnaires (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006). Although such self-reports are sensitive to changes following intensive training in mindfulness, there is also evidence that without such training levels of mindfulness remain relatively stable over time (Baer et al., 2004 and Brown and Ryan, 2003). That is, individuals seem to differ in their natural tendency to be aware of their moment to moment experience in an open and non-judgmental way. Validation studies have related self-reports of mindfulness to a range of behavioral and cognitive variables reflecting hypothesized consequences of mindfulness. For example, event sampling studies have shown that self-reported mindfulness predicts higher levels of autonomy and lower levels of unpleasant affect in daily functioning (Brown & Ryan, 2003). A recent brain study has demonstrated that self-reported levels of dispositional mindfulness are related to resting activity in brain areas involved in self-referential processing as well as amygdala reactivity when viewing emotional faces (Way, Creswell, Eisenberger, & Lieberman, 2010). Consistent with the assumption that mindfulness may protect against the negative effects of emotional vulnerabilities, dispositional mindfulness is negatively related to neuroticism (Giluk, 2009). Furthermore, there is some evidence that it may offset its negative effects. Feltman, Robinson, and Ode (2009) assessed dispositional mindfulness, neuroticism and depressive symptoms cross-sectionally in a sample of students and found that dispositional mindfulness moderated the relation between neuroticism and depressive symptoms: Neuroticism was significantly related to depressive symptoms in those with low levels of dispositional mindfulness, but there was no significant relation between neuroticism and depressive symptoms in those with high levels of dispositional mindfulness. The current study was aimed at replicating and extending these findings. For this study an opportunity had arisen to test the protective effects of dispositional mindfulness in a general population sample that provided information on neuroticism six years before our assessment of depressive symptoms and dispositional mindfulness – also at separate occasions. Investigating relations over relatively remote points in time is consistent with the idea that neuroticism functions as a relatively stable temperamental risk factor and also allowed us to provide stronger control against the effects of general response bias. Previous research on this sample had shown a significant correlation between neuroticism scores assessed six years earlier and current symptoms of depression (Barnhofer & Chittka, 2010). Extending this research in this sample, we hypothesized that when taking into account dispositional mindfulness this relationship would remain significant in those low in dispositional mindfulness but not in those high in dispositional mindfulness. We had used the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al., 2006) to assess dispositional mindfulness, which describes mindfulness as a global factor that encompasses several distinguishable skills. Subscales of this questionnaire measure an individual’s ability to observe internal and external experience, to describe internal experience, to act with awareness, to be non-judgmental, and to be non-reactive to inner experience. Analyzes based on these subscales allowed us to explore which mindfulness skills might be most relevant in offsetting the effects of neuroticism.