Mindfulness and Its Relation To HIV-Risk Behaviors in College Students: Psychological Distress and Attachment as Moderating Factors

Abstract

Mindfulness and Its Relation to HIV-Risk Behaviors in College Students: Psychological Distress and Attachment as Moderating Factors Mindfulness has been an emerging research topic in the past decade. It has drawn great attention in clinical research fields. In this present study, mindfulness as a construct of human personality is investigated. HIV-risk behavior is considered to be related to emotional health. We hypothesized that mindfulness alone has some predictive value for HIV-risk behavior. Emotional distress, demographics, and attachment styles are also measured in the study and controlled in statistical analysis to examine mindfulness' predictive strength on HIV-risk behavior.;In analysis, we found that HIV-risk behaviors are not predicted by mindfulness alone. In other words, there was no significant relation between mindfulness and HIV-risk behaviors even after adjusting for other variables such as attachment styles and emotional distress (R = .27, R2 = .07, F(6, 96) = .515,p = .93). Limitations, such as study design, sample characteristics, and measurements selections, of the study may have affected the result. However, the result contributes to the unknown connections between mindfulness and HIV-risk behaviors. In addition to the findings of the primary hypothesis, the other results indicated that mindfulness, attachment styles and emotional distress are all significantly correlated with each other (mindfulness and attachment styles correlation range: r(110) = - .278 ~ -.513, p < .01). Moreover, hierarchical regression analysis of psychological distress as an outcome measure and mindfulness as predictor variable yielded significant predictive Mindfulness and HIV Risk Behavior 2 value (POMS as an outcome variable: R = .62, R2= .39, F(6, 100) = 5.69,p < .001). These significant findings point to promising future directions after considering the limitations of this study such as its cross-sectional design, restricted population, and particular measures that may have influenced the results.