Doctorate in Clinical Psychology : Main Research Portfolio

: 1) The ‘Long-Term’ Effects of Universal School-based Anxiety Prevention Programs: A Systematic Review; 2) Routine Outcome Monitoring in CAMHS: How Can We Enable Implementation in Practice? ; 3) Dispositional Mindfulness and its Relationship to Distress and Functioning in Adolescents with and without Chronic Pain.

Abstract

Objective: Dispositional mindfulness is the tendency to pay attention to presentmoment awareness without judgment. The main aim of this cross-sectional study was toinvestigate whether dispositional mindfulness accounts for unique variance in distress andfunctioning in adolescents with and without chronic pain. Method: 54 adolescents seekinghelp for chronic pain and 94 adolescents from the general population completed the samebattery of measures including the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure ofdispositional mindfulness (CAMM). Results: As predicted, dispositional mindfulness accounted for unique variance in mood and anxiety in both groups and also the combined data-set after controlling for age, pain intensity, pain-catastrophising and pain-acceptance. However, dispositional mindfulness did not predict physical or social functioning in either group. Dispositional mindfulness scores were normally distributed in both groups, did not differ significantly across the two groups and were not associated with pain intensity in either group. The CAMM demonstrated good internal consistency in both groups. Conclusions: Dispositional mindfulness is an important construct to consider with adolescents experiencing mood and anxiety problems in both general population and chronic pain samples. Further research should aim to replicate these findings in a larger clinical sample and explore the predictive power of dispositional mindfulness in longitudinal designs.

Date of Award	28 Sept 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	James Gregory (Supervisor)