Where does mindfulness collide?

The awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience, in Kabat-Zinn's phrasing. Kabat-Zinn positions mindfulness as a capacity cultivated by formal meditation and rooted in Buddhist contemplative practice, and delivers it through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, an eight-week program of sitting meditation, body scan, and mindful movement. The referent is a trained quality of attention together with a stance of nonjudgmental acceptance toward whatever arises, learned by doing the practice rather than read off a questionnaire.[1]

Unit

A trained quality of present-moment attention

Recovery means

Cultivated and restored by meditation practice

Measured by

Program completion and practice logs; clinical and well-being outcomes, not a mindfulness scale in the original account

An open and receptive attention to, and awareness of, what is occurring in the present, which Brown and Ryan treat as a single quality that varies both as a trait between people and as a state within a person. Brown and Ryan built the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale as a one-factor measure of present-centered attention, scored mostly from reverse-keyed items about acting on automatic pilot, and reported that acceptance items did not improve it. On this account the construct is attention and not acceptance: Brown and Ryan strip the nonjudgmental stance that the clinical tradition treats as essential and keep only the present-moment awareness.[2]

Unit

A person's present-centered attention, as trait and state

Recovery means

Not applicable, a disposition with a parallel momentary state

Measured by

Fifteen reverse-keyed Likert items; MAAS, single factor

A two-component operational definition, proposed by Bishop and a convened panel to make mindfulness testable: first, the self-regulation of attention so that it stays on immediate experience, and second, an orientation toward that experience marked by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. Bishop and colleagues wrote the definition to reconcile the clinical tradition with the demands of measurement, and the definition makes acceptance constitutive rather than optional. Bishop and colleagues differ from Brown and Ryan on exactly this point, and later two-factor and multi-factor scales cite this definition for their structure.[3]

Unit

The construct as two specified components

Recovery means

Not applicable, a definitional proposal

Measured by

No scale in the original; later instruments operationalize the two components

A cognitive mode of actively drawing novel distinctions, which Langer and Moldoveanu define as a state of being situated in the present, sensitive to context and perspective, and aware that categories are constructed. Langer developed the idea in her 1989 book from studies of mindlessness, the reliance on rigid categories formed in the past. The decisive feature, stated plainly by Langer, is that this mindfulness requires no meditation and no contemplative content: Langer's mindfulness is engagement and noticing, closer to cognitive flexibility than to present-moment awareness, and its opposite is automatic categorization rather than a wandering mind. Under one word, Langer's construct and Kabat-Zinn's ask a person to do nearly opposite things.[4][5]

Unit

A person's mode of engaging situations

Recovery means

Not applicable, a cognitive mode induced without training

Measured by

Novelty-seeking, novelty-producing, engagement, and flexibility, in the Langer Mindfulness Scale; experimental inductions of active distinction-drawing