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.
Copyright: © 2023 Wundrack, Specht. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.