Coping With the Crisis: A Mindfulness Manipulation Positively Affects the Emotional Regulation of Action Crises

Action crises arise when people start to hesitate between pursuing an identity-defining personal goal and questioning whether they should pursue it at all (Brandstätter et al., 2013). They can be situated within the Mindset Theory of Action Phases (Gollwitzer, 2012), based on the Rubicon Model (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987). These models propose four phases of goal pursuit, each associated with its own mindset. People should go from (1) deliberating their goal choices (deliberative mindset), to (2) planning actions to achieve their chosen goal (implemental mindset) before (3) engaging in goal-related actions (action mindset), and (4) finally, once they have completed all the tasks that they set for themselves, reflecting on their goal achievement or lack thereof, and on what they should do next (evaluative mindset).

Action crises occur when the accumulation of setbacks erodes the protective mechanisms, such as goal shielding, of the implemental and action mindsets (Brandstätter et al., 2013), making people oscillate between these and the evaluative mindset during goal pursuit. Such oscillations lead to more doubts, less progress, lower well-being (e.g., reduced life satisfaction, increased depressive symptoms), and often, goal disengagement (Brandstätter et al., 2013; Brandstätter & Herrmann, 2016; Ghassemi et al., 2021; Holding et al., 2017).

Marion-Jetten et al. (2022) proposed, based on Garland et al.’s (2015, 2017) mindfulness-to-meaning theory, that mindful people should be better at reappraising action crises as benign, meaningful, or growth-promoting in the third, action phase, of the Rubicon model.

Method

We hypothesized that people who complete a body scan meditation prior to imagining themselves in an action crisis for an important personal goal should report more adaptive, and less maladaptive, emotion regulation strategies than people in a control, magazine-reading, condition. We expected this effect to occur even when controlling for baseline autonomous and controlled goal motivation and baseline action crisis levels.

Autonomous motivation entails pursuing a goal because one feels it is important, valuable, or fun to do so. Controlled motivation entails doing so because of external or internal pressures (Ryan & Deci, 2017). They have numerous consequences, positive and negative respectively, for well-being and affect (see Ryan & Deci, 2017 for a review). Given this and previous research associating goal motivation with action crises (Holding et al., 2017; Marion-Jetten et al., 2022), we determined that they might also influence how people cope with action crises. For instance, a person with a highly controlled goal might more readily blame themselves or others, that is, use maladaptive coping strategies, due to resentment from feeling pressured to pursue such a goal (e.g., Assor et al., 2004). Baseline levels of action crisis were controlled to ensure that the influence of the scenario would be assessed holding constant the action crisis level that participants had for their personal goals to start with. To test our hypothesis, we conducted an experimental laboratory study, in which we manipulated participants’ levels of state mindfulness before inducing a hypothetical action crisis for a personal goal.

Results

We conducted our analyses with SPSS (Version 26). A MANCOVA tested for the effect of the conditions (body scan vs. reading) on the adaptive and maladaptive subscales of the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire while controlling for the effect of baseline goal-motivations and action crisis levels (i.e., measured before any manipulation). Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations, and correlations between the study variables for both conditions.

We first tested whether there was an effect of condition (body scan vs. reading) on both dependent variables. Multivariate homoscedasticity and normality assumptions were met. Using Wilks’ lambda, we found significant multivariate effects of the condition, Λ = .94, F(2, 115) = 3.75, p = 03, ${\mathrm{\eta }}_{\mathrm{p}}^2$ = .06, and baseline action crisis, Λ = .94, F(2, 115) = 3.46, p = .035, ${\mathrm{\eta }}_{\mathrm{p}}^2$ = .06. There was a trending effect for baseline controlled motivation, Λ = .95, F(2, 115) = 2.56, p = .08, ${\mathrm{\eta }}_{\mathrm{p}}^2$ = .04, but not for baseline autonomous motivation, Λ = .98, F(2, 115) = 1.34, p = .27, ${\mathrm{\eta }}_{\mathrm{p}}^2$ = .02.

Follow up ANCOVAs, presented in Table 2, revealed that those in the body scan condition had higher scores on the adaptive subscale of the CERQ than those in the reading magazines condition. For the control variables, there was a trending effect on the adaptive subscale for baseline controlled goal motivation and baseline action crisis, but not for baseline autonomous goal motivation. There was no significant difference between conditions for the maladaptive subscale of the CERQ. For the control variables, baseline autonomous goal motivation, and baseline action crisis were also not significant. Baseline controlled goal motivation had a trending effect on the maladaptive subscale.

Discussion

This study tested the influence of a mindfulness exercise on the emotional regulation of visualized action crises. We randomly assigned participants to either meditate with a body scan meditation recording or to read magazines before presenting them with a personalized action crisis scenario. We then compared their mean levels of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies regarding the action crisis they visualized with the action crisis scenario. This was done while controlling for their baseline autonomous and controlled goal motivations and action crisis levels. Results show that participants in the body scan condition reported significantly higher levels of adaptive emotion regulation than those in the reading condition. On the other hand, there was no significant difference between the groups regarding maladaptive emotion regulation, despite the control group having a higher mean. This might be due to the brevity of our body scan exercise, which may not have been enough to undo entrenched patterns of maladaptive emotion regulation. Indeed, while acquisition of new responses is relatively easy and can rapidly generalize (e.g., the use of a maladaptive strategy reduced anxiety or stress once and is then applied to multiple situations where it might not work), extinction is more complex and difficult to achieve (Vervoort et al., 2014). This is supported by the fact that while studies found a negative relation between dispositional mindfulness and maladaptive emotion regulation (e.g., Parsons et al., 2019), only long-term follow-ups of mindfulness intervention studies, when participants have time to develop and engage with new patterns of coping, have found similar effects. de Vibe et al. (2018) found such an effect six years after a seven-week intervention. This also aligns with neuroimaging evidence showing that mindfulness training (e.g., eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction programs) changes the brain networks involved in the extinction of conditioned fear, which may trigger maladaptive responses to stressors, through the downregulation of the amygdala (see Hölzel et al., 2011).

The present study showed that a short mindfulness exercise, in the form of a body scan meditation, enhanced adaptive emotion regulation following the presentation of a personalized action crisis scenario. This finding provides preliminary support for the proposition that mindfulness might also help people cope with action crises as they are happening in the action phase of the Rubicon Model (Marion-Jetten et al., 2022). It also aligns with previous theoretical propositions and empirical findings by Garland et al. (2015, 2017) that mindfulness meditation increases the use of positive reappraisal coping during stressful events. This finding extends previous research, which had shown that higher dispositional mindfulness helps to prevent action crises (Marion-Jetten et al., 2022), by showing that state mindfulness also helps people regulate their emotions more positively during a visualized action crisis. Our results support further exploration to test the influence of mindfulness on emotion regulation during real, lived, action crises.

As such, a short, 15-minute body scan meditation helped people emotionally appraise an induced, hypothetical, action crisis in an adaptive way. This suggests that mindfulness training over the course of several weeks (e.g., mindfulness-based stress reduction programs) should also promote the adaptive emotion regulation of real, full-fledged, action crises. Considering that mindfulness training increases dispositional mindfulness over time (Brown et al., 2007), future action crises should also become less likely (Marion-Jetten et al., 2022). Mindfulness training thus appears to be a viable option to both prevent action crises and possibly help cope with those that might still arise.

This research also provides a starting point to study action crises for real personal goals experimentally by building on previous studies using scenarios (i.e., Brandstätter & Schüler, 2013). Indeed, the study reported in Supplementary Materials B (“Action Crisis Manipulation”) showed that personalized scenarios could influence action crisis levels for personal goals. Future research should consider expanding and further validating such procedures.