The Italian Adaptation of the Mindful Awareness Attention Scale and its Relation with Individual Differences and Quality of Life Indexes

The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown and Ryan, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84:822–848, 2003) measures individual differences in daily mindful states. This research aimed to create an Italian adaptation of the MAAS, to explore its psychometric characteristics and its divergent and convergent validity, and to assess its relation with quality of life indexes. Study 1 (overall N = 465; 197 males and 266 females; divided into two subsamples: n = 200; 89 males and 109 females; n = 265; 108 males and 157 females) showed that the Italian adaptation of the MAAS has good psychometric properties and that its scores are not affected by the participants’ gender. Furthermore, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis supported the expected single-factor structure. Study 2 (N = 211; 106 males and 99 females) confirmed the mono-factorial structure and showed that the Italian version of MAAS is unrelated to reflection and private self-consciousness, negatively related to rumination, and positively associated to two personality dimensions: emotional stability and conscientiousness. Finally, the Italian version of MAAS showed to be positively related to well-being, measured by the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg, 1992), and negatively associated to personal distress, also when controlling for the effects of social desirability and of the individual differences considered in the validation process.