Mindfulness in Latin America: Psychometric Insights from the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS-5) Across Four Countries

Introduction: The high prevalence of mental health challenges in Latin America highlights the need for brief, culturally sensitive instruments capable of accurately assessing protective psychological resources, such as mindfulness. Aim: Accordingly, the present study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the abbreviated Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS-5) in four Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. Methods: A total of 2,343 adults from Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico participated in the study, recruited through non-probabilistic snowball sampling, and completed the MAAS-5 and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4). Results: The instrument was evaluated for its internal structure, reliability, cross-cultural equivalence, and associations with external variables using descriptive analyses, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), measurement invariance testing, psychometric network analysis, and latent correlations. CFA results supported a unidimensional structure across all countries. Measurement invariance analyses supported configural, metric, and scalar invariance across countries. Complementarily, network analysis confirmed a one-community structure, with node loadings exceeding .35 and high stability across 1,000 bootstrap samples. Within the network, items reflecting automaticity and inattention during action occupied relatively more central positions, whereas meta-oriented disengagement showed a more peripheral role. Finally, latent correlation analyses revealed strong negative associations between mindfulness and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Conclusions: Overall, the findings provide evidence for the structural validity, stability, and cross-cultural equivalence of the MAAS-5, supporting its utility as a brief and reliable measure of mindfulness in clinical, educational, and population-based research contexts. The implications for cross-cultural assessment and the development of mindfulness-based interventions in Latin America are discussed.