USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

Authors

Jamie Onufrak

First Advisor

Dr. Lindsey Rodriguez

Second Advisor

Dr. Wendy Rote

Third Advisor

Dr. Tiffany Chenneville

Publisher

University of South Florida St. Petersburg

Document Type

Thesis

Date Available

05-07-2019

Publication Date

2019

Date Issued

March 4, 2019

Abstract

Recent research has found associations between attachment security and mindfulness, such that individuals who are more secure in their relationships are more mindful, while those less secure in their relationships are less mindful. However, not much is known about the directionality and underlying mechanisms of this relationship. Recent research has suggested that emotion regulation is a mediator of this relationship. The present study tests if priming attachment security leads to an increase in state mindfulness, and if this relationship is mediated by state emotion regulation. Participants recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 205) were randomly assigned to complete one of two visualization and writing tasks: either an attachment security priming condition (experimental) or placebo task condition (control). They completed measures of state attachment security, state emotion regulation and state mindfulness pre and postmanipulation. Consistent with hypotheses, there was a significant indirect effect of condition on state mindfulness via state emotion regulation (b=.109, 95% CI [.015, .230]). These results suggest that increases in state attachment security lead to improvements in emotion regulation and thus decreases in state mindfulness. However, contrary to hypotheses, when looking at the total effect with a different measure of mindfulness, the state attachment security prime predicted decreases in state mindfulness (b= -.268, p=.041). Possible explanations for these findings, implications, and future directions are discussed.

Comments

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s in Psychology Department of Psychology College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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