Current Opinion in Psychology
November 10, 2018
Ruth A. Baer
Assessment of mindfulness is essential to understanding its relationships with psychological functioning. Currently, mindfulness is most often assessed with self-report questionnaires. Although additional work is required, mindfulness questionnaires have reasonable psychometric properties and are making important contributions to the understanding of mindfulness and its effects on health and...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 25, 2018
Claire Petitmengin, Martijn van Beek, Michel Bitbol et al.
163 citations
Numerous scientific studies are conducted on the neurophysiological effects of meditation practices and on the neural correlates of meditative states. However, very few studies have been conducted on the experience associated with contemplative practice: what it is like to meditate - from moment to moment, at different stages of different forms of practice - remains almost invisible in...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 15, 2018
Silke Rupprecht, Wibo Koole, Michael Chaskalson et al.
Current workplace mindfulness research and interventions assume that teaching mindfulness will have beneficial effects for people and organizations. While research shows that mindfulness trainings may increase resilience of working adults, assuming that mindfulness will have independent effects on outcomes at different levels of an organization is not well grounded. We assert that mindfulness...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 11, 2018
Amanda J Shallcross, Pallavi Visvanathan, Sarah H Sperber et al.
The high incidence of poor sleep and associated negative health consequences substantiates the need for effective behavioral sleep interventions. We offer an integrative model of sleep disturbance whereby key risk factors for compromised sleep quality and quantity are targeted through mindfulness practice-namely, experiential awareness, attentional control, and acceptance. Theoretical...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 9, 2018
Bhikkhu Anālayo
Research on Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBI) is hampered by semantic ambiguity surrounding the term 'mindfulness'. Understanding the core quality involved in such research could be improved by adding historical depth to definitions of mindfulness, based on more detailed information on mindfulness from text-historical and doctrinal sources in the Buddhist traditions. Particular applications...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 9, 2018
Martine Batchelor
This essay explores the relevance of the practice of mindfulness of feeling tones as a useful framework for research. First it presents three common types of feeling tones: pleasant/unpleasant and neutral. Then it looks at the matrix in which they could be usefully considered for research, that is the nāma factors (contact, feeling tone, perception, attention and intention). It explains that...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 9, 2018
Rebecca S. Crane, Willem Kuyken
The Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC) is a tool for supporting good practice in mindfulness-based teaching, training supervision and research contexts. It has been taken up in practice in teacher training organizations worldwide. The MBI:TAC sits within the wider consideration within research contexts of building methodological rigor by developing robust...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 5, 2018
William S Waldron
The modern mindfulness movement often cites early Buddhist texts that outline its basic practices. These texts, though, depict a different kind of practice, one which involves ongoing nonconscious dispositions that underlie and give rise to recurrent affective and cognitive responses to similar stimuli. In later Indian Buddhist traditions, especially the Yogācāra school, these patterns were...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 5, 2018
Rebecca S. Crane
To ensure methodological rigour, research on Mindfulness-Based Programs (MBPs) should include systems for assessing and reporting the integrity of the intervention. The critical variable of the quality of the teaching and the degree of adherence to the curriculum are likely to influence research outcomes and their interpretation. Currently, three tools for assessing intervention integrity in...
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 5, 2018
Sonja M. Geiger, Paul Grossman, Ulf Schrader
Mindfulness-based approaches have been suggested as a potential remedy for an increasingly unsustainable consumption level in early industrialized countries. This article reviews twelve current empiric papers (2005ø2013) on five different potential pathways in which mindfulness is thought to unfold its effects on sustainable behaviors. Unfortunately, robust empiric evidence on the...
Current Opinion in Psychology
September 1, 2018
JD Knotts, Brian Odegaard, Hakwan Lau et al.
How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent mismatch has led some to posit that rich phenomenological content overflows cognitive access, whereas others hold that phenomenology is in fact sparse and constrained by cognitive access. Here, we review the Rich vs. Sparse debate as it relates to a...