The assessment of mindfulness is a relatively new field, with self-report instruments emerging only within the last 15 years. During that time, mindfulness questionnaires have passed a number of psychometric tests. They are widely used and have made substantial contributions to current understanding of the nature of mindfulness as a psychological capacity and the effects of contemporary mindfulness-based interventions.
Despite these encouraging findings, the need for expanded understanding of self-report methods and the development of more objective performance-based tasks is widely recognized.
The six articles in the July special issue of Psychological Assessment move the field in these directions. The first three papers focus on self-report instruments; the others describe promising laboratory-based tasks.
In the first paper in the self-report group, Gu et al. (2016) explore the factor structure of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al., 2006) before and after mindfulness training and examine how mindfulness skills and the relationships between them shift with practice. This article also provides support for a 15-item short form of the FFMQ.
The second paper (Quaglia et al., 2016) presents a meta-analytic review of the components of self-reported mindfulness that change with mindfulness training and shows that these changes are correlated with therapeutic outcomes.
The third article (Sahdra, Ciarrochi, & Parker, 2016) presents findings for a new instrument to measure non-attachment, a construct with origins in Buddhist teachings that is increasingly discussed in the mindfulness literature. Results show that non-attachment is closely related to mindfulness but empirically distinct from it.
The next three articles describe behavioral and performance-based tasks.
The first (Frewen, Hargraves, DePierro, D'Andrea, & Flodrowski, 2016) provides new data about Meditation Breath Awareness Scores (MBAS), a measure of focused attention during meditation. In this task, bells are sounded during a meditation exercise; participants indicate whether their attention at that moment was focused on the breath or had wandered away. Findings show interesting patterns both within and across successive meditation sessions.
The second article in this group (Shepherd, Coifman, Matt, & Fresco, 2016) describes a self-distancing task designed to measure skills associated with mindfulness and decentering. This task requires participants to view images of negative or neutral objects (e.g., spiders or paper clips) and rate whether each would fit in their hand or in a shoe box. Imagining a threatening object in one's hand is expected to slow response times, although people with better mindfulness and decentering skills should be less influenced by the valence of the object. Findings confirmed these predictions.
The third article in this group (Hadash, Plonsker, Vago, & Bernstein, 2016) developed a new implicit associations task to assess participants' responses to fear; specifically, the extent to which they identified with it as part of themselves and judged themselves negatively for feeling fearful. This task showed promising psychometric properties and will contribute to future research on mindfulness of difficult internal experiences.
The assessment of mindfulness and related variables is crucial to understanding the nature of mindfulness, the effects of mindfulness training, and the mechanisms of change of mindfulness-based interventions.
The articles in this special issue reflect exciting new developments in this active and productive area.
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Note: This article is in the Clinical Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Clinical Psychology topic area.