The effect of mindfulness on academic procrastination among university students: the mediating roles of attentional control and emotion regulation

Academic procrastination represents a widespread failure of self-regulation among university students, yet the cognitive and emotional mechanisms through which protective factors operate remain insufficiently explored. This study investigated whether attentional control and emotion regulation function as parallel mediators in the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and academic procrastination. Data were collected from 564 Chinese undergraduate students using self-report measures across all four constructs, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to evaluate both the measurement and structural models. The results showed that mindfulness was negatively associated with academic procrastination through both direct and indirect pathways. In particular, higher mindfulness was associated with stronger attentional control and more adaptive emotion regulation, each of which was in turn associated with lower procrastination. Both indirect effects were statistically significant, together accounting for a substantial portion of mindfulness’s overall association with procrastination. These findings deepen understanding of the self-regulatory mechanisms underlying the mindfulness–procrastination relationship and suggest that mindfulness, attentional control, and emotion regulation are meaningfully linked in students’ academic functioning.