Mindful self-focus–an interaction affecting Theory of Mind?

Abstract

Is thinking about oneself helpful or harmful for understanding other people? The answer might depend on how a person thinks about themself. Mindfulness is one prominent construct that seems to affect the quality and content of a person’s thoughts about themselves in the world. Thus, we hypothesize that the relationship between self-focus and Theory of Mind (ToM) is moderated by mindfulness. We evaluate our hypothesis with a large cross-sectional dataset (N = 543) of native and non-native German and English speakers using OLS and MM-estimated robust multiple regression analysis. We found a small but robust self-focus × mindfulness interaction effect on ToM so that there was a significant positive relation between self-focus and ToM for more mindful individuals and no significant relation for less mindful individuals. The findings support our hypothesis that mindfulness moderates the relationship between self-focus and ToM performance. We discuss the limitations and differences between the present study and previous findings.