Abstract

The present study was designed to evaluated the moderating effect of mindfulness and dispositional optimism on the relation between stress of life and depression. For this, a sample of under-graduate students (179 male students, 193 female students) completed Negative Life stress questionnaire, Korean Version of Five-factor Mindfulness Questionnaire, Life Orienting Test, Center for Epidemiologic Student Depression. Correlation analysis was tested to address the relation among negative stress of life, mindfulness, dispositional optimism, and depression. Hierarchical multi-variate regression analysis was also implemented for addressing the moderating effect of mindfulness and optimism on the relation between negative stress of life and depression. In the results about stress of life, both of stress for personal relations and stress on achievement showed significant positive relationship. In the test on the scale of five factor mindfulness, four factors except description had significant correlations with depression. Specifically interaction effect of stress of personal relations and dispositional optimism explains the variable depression with significance. This means that dispositional optimism acts as moderating variable on the relation between stress of personal relations and depression. Even though it was weak for interaction effect of stress of personal relations and mindfulness to interpret depression, the interaction effect was impressed as a role of moderating variable because of the high significance level of the effect. However, the moderating effect of mindfulness on the relation between stress of achievement and depression did not have significance. (Korean J Str Res 2009;17:369∼378)

• Keywords: Stress of life, Mindfulness, Dispositional optimism, Depression