Nonreactivity and Resilience to Stress: Gauging the Mindfulness of African American College Students

Objectives Resilience is a protective factor against stress and research indicates that mindfulness is associated with increased resilience. Few mindfulness studies have specifically focused on African American college students, who are at heightened risk to the effects of stress due to race-related factors such as social, economic, and political exclusion relative to their Caucasian counterparts, who have received the bulk of mindfulness research attention. It is important to understand how mindfulness is related to resilience within this population and to examine if specific components of mindfulness are particularly predictive of increased resilience. Methods In this study, African American undergraduate students attending a Historically Black University administered the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS). Results Mindfulness was found to be positively associated with resilience (r = .68). A multiple hierarchical regression indicated that the nonreactivity facet of mindfulness, the capacity to pause before responding to stimuli, explained the largest amount of unique variance (Delta R-2 =.11, p < .001) compared to acting with awareness (Delta R-2 =.07), nonjudging (Delta R-2 =.03), and describing (Delta R-2 =.02), as unique predictors. Conclusions Results indicated that the capacity for nonreactivity may play a unique potentiating role in the relationship between mindfulness and resilience in African American college students, which could inform the development of college programming. The results indicate that it may be useful to create new mindfulness-based interventions specifically with the intention of building the skill of nonreactivity in order to cultivate resilience.