Contemplative Science Comes of Age: Looking Backward and Forward 20 Years After Baer (2003).
Simon B Goldberg, Richard J Davidson
Clinical psychology : a publication of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association March 1, 2024 DOI: 10.1037/cps0000186 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Commentary Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | The commentary notes that Baer's 2003 meta-analysis addressed mindfulness-based interventions for depression, anxiety, stress, and pain, topics that remain clinically pressing 20 years later. It observes that self-compassion was only beginning to appear in the scientific literature in 2003, and that experimental research on loving-kindness and compassion meditation was still nearly a decade away. |
Abstract
A lot has happened in the 20 years since Baer (2003) published the first meta-analysis of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice.The year 2003 was a time before the iPhone, before Facebook, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, and certainly before advances in artificial intelligence brought algorithmdelivered content to our digital devices and large language models could mimic human interaction disturbingly well.Yet, Baer's meta-analysis examined the effects of MBIs on the same clinical challenges that plague us today: depression, anxiety, stress, pain.In 2003, self-compassion was only just emerging as a term in the scientific lexicon and experimental work studying interventions based on loving-kindness and compassion meditation (LKCM) was still almost a decade away (Neff, 2023).