The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Attributional Styles and Academic Optimism of Students

Students' academic success and failure is one of the most important events during their studies that has short-term and long-term social and emotional effects on them. Accordingly, the present study was conducted with the aim of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on attributional styles and academic optimism of students.

The present study was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest with a control group and a follow-up stage. The statistical population consisted of all male high school students in Qazvin in the academic year 1399-1400, in which 40 students were selected by cluster sampling and after matching were placed in two experimental and control groups. Research instruments included the Academic Optimism Questionnaire (Tschenen-Moran et al., 2013) and the Attribution Styles Questionnaire (Peterson and Seligman, 1984). The experimental group received therapeutic interventions related to cognitive therapy based on mindfulness. Data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance.

The results showed that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was effective on the components of attributional styles (P<0.01) and the variables of academic optimism (P<0.01) and these results continued in the follow-up period (P<0.01).

Students who were influenced by cognitive-based mindfulness attributed positive events more to internal, stable and general causes and negative events more to external, unstable and specific causes. Mindfulness can also be effective in promoting optimism by providing a framework for interpreting life experiences, being in the "here and now", a sense of cohesiveness and existential cohesion, and student confidence.