Experiential Avoidance as the Mechanism of Mindfulness Intervention in Reducing Emotional Distress: Daily Dairy Research

Experiential Avoidance as the Mechanism of Mindfulness Based Intervention in Reducing Emotional Distress: Daily Dairy Research

This study hopes to:

1. explore whether three weeks of MIED could promote experiential avoidance.
2. explore experiential avoidance could be a mediation of outcomes of MIED.

Experiential avoidance refers to individuals resisting experiences or trying to eliminate certain experiences (such as emotions, thoughts, physical feelings, memory and behavioral tendencies, etc.), and trying to adopt corresponding strategies to change these experiences and the situations in which the experiences are generated (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette, & Strosahl, 1996). Experiential avoidance has been proved to be a maintenance factor for many psychological disorders (Boelen & Reijntjes, 2008), and trying to hide or suppress unpleasant thoughts, feelings and physical feelings will increase the frequency and pain of these same experiences (Gross,1998; Gross,2002; Sloan, 2004; Wegner, 1994). According to some reviews, experiential avoidance is one of the beneficial effects of mindfulness (Brown, Bravo, Roos, & Pearson, 2015; Shapiro et al., 2006). However, no study has examined experiential avoidance as mediator in mindfulness intervention whether in the between-subject or in within-subject level . Therefore, this study uses daily diary research explore the role of experiential avoidance as the effective mechanism of mindfulness intervention.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Subjects with scores greater than 21 on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Subjects who could not access the Internet;
• Subjects with insufficient Chinese ability;
• Subjects who have participated in mindfulness based projects for more than 6 weeks before, and / or the current frequency of meditation practice is more than once a week;
• Patients with schizophrenia or psychotic affective disorder, current organic mental disorder, substance abuse disorder and generalized developmental disorder;
• Subjects at risk of suicide.