Objectives

Receiving feedback is vital to learning and job performance, but this can provoke undesirable psychological responses, including loss of self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. While mindfulness can attenuate responses to self-threats, it is unknown if this occurs following self-esteem threats, including negative feedback. This experimental study investigates a proposed moderated mediation model of how brief mindfulness meditation may attenuate these psychological responses to negative feedback.

Methods

The proposed model was tested through a randomized 2 × 2 factor experiment with a sample of undergraduate students (N = 163). Participants completed a performance task (the Remote Associates Test), followed by an audio guided mindfulness induction (mindfulness meditation v. mind-wandering active control). After receiving randomized performance feedback, either negative or positive feedback, participants reported their state self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. We modeled feedback as predicting self-regulatory depletion through self-esteem, and brief mindfulness meditation moderating the relationship between feedback and self-esteem, and through this influencing the indirect relationship of feedback and self-regulatory depletion.

Results

Findings provided support for the proposed moderated mediation model. Inducing mindfulness via brief meditation weakened the relationship between negative feedback and decreased self-esteem, thus contributing to lower self-regulatory depletion.

Conclusions

The results provide evidence that inducing mindfulness through meditation attenuates psychological responses to negative feedback, including loss of state self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. This adds to understanding of the intersection of mindfulness practice, the self, and practice in educational and workplace domains.