Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation

Mindfulness is often described as non-evaluative awareness, but its traditional purpose was to foster eudaimonic well-being. The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory proposes that mindfulness enhances interoceptive attention, which increases cognitive flexibility, enabling reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experiences. This process is theorized to deepen meaning-making and engagement with life, addressing a gap in psychological research on how mindfulness influences emotion regulation and sense of meaning.

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Abstract

Contemporary scholarship on mindfulness casts it as a form of purely non-evaluative engagement with experience. Yet, traditionally mindfulness was not intended to operate in a vacuum of dispassionate observation, but was seen as facilitative of eudaimonic mental states. In spite of this historical context, modern psychological research has neglected to ask the question of how the practice of mindfulness affects downstream emotion regulatory processes to impact the sense of meaning in life. To fill this lacuna, here we describe the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory, from which we derive a novel process model of mindful positive emotion regulation informed by affective science, in which mindfulness is proposed to introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life.