Moderating Effect of Mindfulness on the Influence of Stress on Depression According to the Level of Stress among University Students in South Korea

Kwang-Hi Park, Hyunlye Kim and Jaehee Kim
Additional contact information
Kwang-Hi Park: College of Nursing, Gachon University, Incheon 21936, Korea
Hyunlye Kim: Department of Nursing, College of Medicine, Chosun University, Gwangju 61452, Korea
Jaehee Kim: Department of Nursing, College of Science and Technology, Daejin University, Pocheon 11159, Korea

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 18, 1-11

Abstract: Stress and depression are representative of the mental health problems of university students worldwide. This cross-sectional study explored the moderating effect of mindfulness on the influence of stress on depression according to the degree of life stress. The participants were 738 university students in years 2–4 in five 4-year universities in South Korea. Depression was positively correlated with stress and negatively with mindfulness at a statistically significant level. In multiple regression analysis, stress was found to have an effect by increasing depression, and mindfulness by relieving depression. In the moderated multiple regression analysis, mindfulness had a moderating effect on the impact of stress on depression only in low-stress groups, showing that the interaction of stress with mindfulness was significantly negative (β = −0.11, t = −2.52, p = 0.012) and the inclusion of this interaction significantly increased the explanatory power for depression variation (F change 6.36, p = 0.012) in the full model. In conclusion, we suggest considering stress levels in the development of mindfulness-based intervention strategies to effectively manage the depression of university students.

Keywords: stress; mindfulness; depression; university students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/18/6634/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/18/6634/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:18:p:6634-:d:412337

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().