Dispositional mindfulness, perceived social support and emotion regulation among Chinese firefighters: a longitudinal study

This study explored whether perceived social support moderated the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and emotion regulation. The data was collected from a fire sergeant training center by paper-and-pencil surveys at two times in Jiangsu province, China. A total of 340 Chinese male firefighters (Mage = 21.33 years; SD = 1.55 years) reported their levels of dispositional mindfulness, emotion regulation and perceived social support at base-line (T1) and three-month follow-up (T2). At the Time 1, all participants completed assessments of dispositional mindfulness, perceived social support, emotion regulation and provided their demographics information (age and gender). After 3 months, at Time 2, participants completed measures of emotion regulation, depression and PTSD. This study found that after controlling for age, the work time as well as the level of posttraumatic stress symptoms and depression, perceived social support at T1 played a moderating role between dispositional mindfulness at T1 and expressive suppression at T2, but it didn’t moderate the relationship between dispositional mindfulness at T1 and cognitive reappraisal at T2. Specifically, for firefighters with higher perceived social support, higher dispositional mindfulness was significantly associated with lower expressive suppression. However, the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and expressive suppression was not significant for those with low perceived social support. Findings highlight the beneficial effects of the interaction between mindfulness and social support on the emotion regulation of firefighters. The implications of this research, including perceived social support interventions targeting emergency service professionals were discussed.