The Fixed Mindset of Anxiety Predicts Future Distress: A Longitudinal Study.

Mindsets, or beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes such as intelligence and personality, have been linked to a wide range of outcomes in educational and social psychology. There has been recent interest in exploring this construct in clinical psychological contexts. To that end, research has shown that the fixed mindset of anxiety-the belief that anxiety is fixed and unchangeable-is related to a variety of psychological distress symptoms, emotion regulation strategies, and treatment preferences. One outstanding question is whether the fixed mindset of anxiety predicts future psychological symptoms. To address this question, the current longitudinal study assessed weekly distress and anxiety mindset across 5 weeks. We found that fixed mindset of anxiety is predictive of future weekly distress, even after controlling for the previous week's distress, sex, socioeconomic status, baseline depression symptoms, and presence of psychiatric diagnosis. These findings add evidence to an emerging conceptual framework in which the fixed mindset of anxiety represents an important risk factor for the onset of future psychological problems.

A mind full of self: Self-referential processing as a mechanism underlying the therapeutic effects of mindfulness training on internalizing disorders.

The aim of the current review is to advance the hypothesis that change in self-referential processing is a key but under-examined mechanism through which mindfulness training confers its therapeutic benefits for individuals with internalizing disorders. Consequently, we integrated neuroscientific studies on aberrant self-referential processing in internalizing disorders with contemplative science scholarship examining the effects of mindfulness training on the self-referential system. Reviewing these literatures yielded four major conclusions: (1) internalizing disorders can be characterized by excessive self-referential processing and emotion dysregulation; (2) mindfulness training has moderate effects on reducing internalizing symptoms; (3) mindfulness training promotes the shifting from narrative self-focus to present-centered experiential awareness; (4) such mindfulness-induced changes in self-reference is accompanied by reduced activation in overactive self-referential brain regions that have been implicated in internalizing disorders. Clinical and research implications related to delineating the role of self-referential processing in producing the therapeutic effects of mindfulness training are discussed.