Mindful Coping With Stress: A Multilevel Analysis of the Effect of Trait Self-Efficacy Beliefs on the Association of State Mindfulness and Coping Responses in Everyday Life

Abstract Objectives While the stress-buffering effects of trait mindfulness—a stable, dispositional characteristic—are widely explored, the dynamic role of state mindfulness, a momentary and fluctuating experience, remains largely unknown, especially in the context of coping. The present study investigated the relations between state mindfulness and the use of coping strategies in everyday contexts, as well as whether dispositional self-efficacy beliefs moderate the relations between momentary mindfulness and coping responses. Specifically, it was assumed that higher momentary mindfulness facilitates the use of more engagement and less disengagement coping on a given occasion. Moreover, it was hypothesized that the association of mindful states and coping varies by self-efficacy beliefs. Method For testing the assumptions, an ambulatory assessment was conducted with 211 participants (86.3% female; age M = 23.33 years, SD = 5.61), who reported their momentary mindfulness and coping three times a day over a 7-day period using the Multidimensional State Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Brief COPE. Additionally, participants gave answers about their self-efficacy beliefs once at the beginning of the study, using the General Self-efficacy Scale. Analyses used multilevel regression models with robust maximum likelihood estimation and full information maximum likelihood for missing data. Results Results indicated that an individual’s momentary mindfulness is related to more engagement and less disengagement coping on a given occasion. They further show that there is a negative association between mindfulness and disengagement coping for people with low self-efficacy beliefs, but not for people with high self-efficacy beliefs. Conclusions This study sheds light on the associations between momentary mindfulness and coping responses in daily life and integrated dispositional self-efficacy beliefs as an additional influential factor in this relation. Preregistration The preregistration of the analyses reported in this article is available at the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/jhcvt/overview ). The preregistration was completed after data collection but prior to the statistical analyses described in this article.