Dispositional mindfulness in individuals with different levels of physical activity

Abstract

Mental health is closely related to physical activity and awareness. Mindfulness as a personality trait measured by questionnaires is commonly referred to as “dispositional mindfulness” (DMF). However, the relationship between physical activity and DMF aspects remains unknown. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the DMF aspects in cyclic sport athletes and non-athletes. The participants of the study comprised 41 students who were athletes in cyclic sports (cross-country skiing, athletics, average age 20.9±2.4 (mean ±SD)) and 52 students not involved in sports (average age 20.8±2.2). The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) was used to assess DMF. The statistical processing of the results involved the PLS analysis and the Mann—Whitney U-test. It was revealed that Such DMF scales as “acting with awareness”, “accepting without judgment” and “describing” are included in the first latent structure, which determines most of the entire DMF variance. Higher values of “acting with awareness” (median [upper; lower quartiles]: 32 [29; 35]), “accepting without judgment” (29 [24; 33]) and “describing” (29 [26; 34]) were revealed in athletes compared to non-athletes (the same parameters, respectively: 26.5 [22; 39], 23 [20.5; 31.5], 26 [24; 29]). The DMF aspect “observing” has a factor load for the second structure = 0.9. In this aspect, the athletes of high level demonstrated lower DMF aspect “observing” in contrast to the athletes of low level (21 [17; 23] in the athletes of high level and 28.5 [21; 30,5] in the athletes of low level). We can make the following conclusions: (1) We identified two latent structures, which explain most of the entire variance of the DMF aspects. (2) The results revealed contrast groups with opposite factor loads of DMF: the athletes vs. the non-athletes (opposite in the first structure) and the athletes of high level vs. the athletes of low level (in the second structure).