89. The BDI-II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) contains 21 statements that assess the severity of depressive symptoms such as low mood, anhedonia, changes in sleep, appetite, concentration, etc. over the preceding two weeks. Beck et al. (1996) report good internal consistency in both patient and student samples and one-week re-test-reliability of r = .93 suggesting that the test is robust against

daily variations in mood in depressed samples. The FFMQ (Baer et al., 2006) was developed based on factor analyzes of previously published Gemcitabine price mindfulness questionnaires. It assesses five facets of a general tendency to be mindful in daily life: observing (“I notice the smells and aromas of things”), describing (“I am good at finding words to describe my feelings”), acting with awareness (“I find myself doing things without paying Apoptosis inhibitor attention” – reverse scored), non-judging of inner experience (“I think

some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I should not feel them” – reverse scored), and non-reactivity to inner experience (“I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them”). In line with the assumption that mindfulness has beneficial effects on emotional health, validation studies have reported negative correlations between the FFMQ (total and subscale scores) and self-report measures of emotional symptoms and distress as well as positive correlations with self-report measures of psychological well-being (Baer et al., 2008). Internal consistency of the subscales of the FFMQ in our sample was generally acceptable (see Table 1). Zero-order Cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase correlations showed that neuroticism scores assessed 6 years previously were correlated with the severity of current symptoms

of depression as assessed by BDI-II, r = .56, p < .001. The FFMQ total mindfulness score was inversely correlated with both neuroticism, r = −.60, p < .001, and severity of current symptoms of depression, r = −.58, p < .001. Correlations of the subscales of the FFMQ showed the same pattern of findings – significant inverse correlations with both neuroticism and current symptoms of depression – for all of the subscales apart from the “Observing” scale, which did not show a significant relation with either neuroticism or severity of current symptoms of depression. Correlation coefficients, means and standard deviations of raw scores and percent of maximum possible scores (POMP; Cohen, Cohen, Aiken, & West, 1999) on all scales are listed in Table 1. In order to investigate the effects of neuroticism and mindfulness on current symptoms of depression we conducted a linear regression. In the first step EPQ neuroticism was entered as predictor of BDI-II scores yielding a significant effect, t = 8.21, p < .001, β = .56, R2 = .32, ƒ2 = .47.