We compare lay and clinical definitions of mindfulness and trace the historic and contemporary meaning of mindfulness in the popular literature.
We meta-analyze relations between facets of the Five Facet Mindfulness scale.
We review the nomological network of widely used mindfulness instruments.
Popular use of the term shows no evidence of mindfulness reflecting disengagement.
Contrary to experts, lay people conflate mindful acceptance with disengagement.
Psychological theories cast mindfulness as a form of awareness in which accepting the presence of stressful thoughts and feelings facilitates engaged exploration and identification of adaptive responses. Critics of mindfulness' popularization suggest that lay people misconstrue acceptance as a passive endorsement of experience, undermining engaged problem-solving. To evaluate this criticism, we traced the contemporary semantic meaning of mindfulness in three of the most extensive linguistic corpora of English language and found that general public's depictions of mindfulness highlight engagement-related processes. We further analyzed the nomological network of mindfulness. While mindfulness theories suggest a general convergence of facets representing awareness and acceptance, in a meta-analysis (k = 145; N = 41,966) of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire only expert- and clinical samples reported convergence, whereas lay people showed absent or even antagonistic associations. Further, contrary to the synergistic model of awareness and acceptance contributing to greater engagement, empirical probes of two lay samples (Ntotal = 406) show that acceptance is either unrelated or inversely related to markers of engagement. To overcome resulting conceptual and methodological challenges, we highlight the need for a contextualized mindfulness framework whereby acceptance enables the process of engaging with life's challenges rather than avoiding them.
A standard English dictionary defines mindfulness is “a mental state achieved by concentrating on the present moment, while calmly accepting the feelings and thoughts that come to you, used as a technique to help you relax” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020). This standard definition combines two approaches1
We evaluated whether relief is integral to lay conceptions of mindfulness using computational linguistic tools. To examine the semantic meaning of mindfulness, we examined which nouns the term “mindfulness” depends on, by tracking the top ten nouns in the last half century (1979 to 2019) within the most extensive linguistic corpus databases of English language available today: Google Books Ngram corpus (Lin et al., 2012), 1979– 2019; Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2010
We addressed these limitations by turning to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2010) – the only large, genre-balanced corpus of one billion words of text in American English. COCA spans 1990-2020. One advantage of this database is that it does not include religious texts. Instead, in addition to academic texts, it includes fiction, newspapers, popular magazines, as well as TV and movie subtitles and webpages/blogs. Preliminary analyses showed that mindfulness appears
Given that COCA corpus includes academic texts (Davies, 2010), we cross-validated our results on iWeb – the immense structured corpus of web-based English, which encompasses 14 billion words in 22 million web pages from the 95,000 most frequently visited English-language websites in 2017 (www.english-corpora.org/iweb
). We used the same procedure as with COCA above to identify the collocates of mindfulness. As Fig. 2 indicates, the most common terms concerned self-compassion, discernment, and
While the awareness component of mindfulness may be acknowledged in both popular culture and in consensus scholarly definitions, acceptance is less likely to be featured in contemporary writing on mindfulness, despite its presence in both the dictionary and clinical scholarship. It is therefore possible that acceptance as a form of mindful engagement is being lost in translation within grassroots, popular accounts. In other words, just because scholars understand acceptance to be a constituent
Even though some of the awareness and acceptance-related facets of the commonly used FFMQ mindfulness scale are either negligibly or negatively related to each other among the non-clinical lay people, it is still possible that these facets provide additive contribution to the diagnostic nomological network of the construct (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Such a network ought to include the theoretical framework for what one aims to measure, an empirical framework for how one is going to measure it,
It appears that criticism of the popular mindfulness movement is only partially justified. Our computational linguistics analyses of the semantic meaning of the construct suggests that representations of mindfulness in the popular media do not overemphasize stress relief at the expense of engagement-related processes. Across three of the largest text corpora of English language today, engagement has been at least as (if not more) prominently featured as stress relief.
Nevertheless, both
What could explain this omission, if not mismeasurement, of the acceptance component of mindfulness among the lay public? One possibility is that acceptance is not considered part of the mindfulness process in lay understandings, but rather treated as an outcome of mindfulness instead. If this is the case, the lack of relationship between awareness and acceptance in psychometric analyses, like those showcased above and in past research (Siegling and Petrides, 2016), may reflect misalignment of
Interpretation of individual differences in mindfulness and understanding their role for sustaining well-being and mental health depend on consideration of situational and contextual factors for lay understandings of mindfulness, the process through which awareness and acceptance are related to each other, and how people dynamically express awareness and acceptance in real time. Below, we outline several suggestions for ways to rectify conceptual and methodological challenges that may play a
Semantic understanding of mindfulness in popular culture has little evidence of the “McMindfulness” epidemic some social critiques are warning about. At the same time, lay understanding and common measurement practices of mindfulness suggest little convergence across ostensible facets of the construct among lay people. Moreover, one of chief components of mindfulness—acceptance— is not sufficiently understood, nor satisfactorily measured, particularly for those who are naive to training or
Funding for this study was provided by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (435-2014-0685, to I.G.), Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (ER16-12-169, to I.G.), Templeton Pathways to Character Award (to I.G.) and Mindful Trust Research Award from the Oxford Mindfulness Centre (to N.F.). None of the funders had any role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or