Abstract
Mindfulness practice of present moment awareness promises many benefits, but has eluded rigorous behavioral measurement. To date, research has relied on self-reported mindfulness or heterogeneous mindfulness trainings to infer skillful mindfulness practice and its effects. In four independent studies with over 400 total participants, we present the first construct validation of a behavioral measure of mindfulness, breath counting. We found it was reliable, correlated with self-reported mindfulness, differentiated long-term meditators from age-matched controls, and was distinct from sustained attention and working memory measures. In addition, we employed breath counting to test the nomological network of mindfulness. As theorized, we found skill in breath counting associated with more meta-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood, and greater non-attachment (i.e., less attentional capture by distractors formerly paired with reward). We also found in a randomized online training study that 4 weeks of breath counting training improved mindfulness and decreased mind wandering relative to working memory training and no training controls. Together, these findings provide the first evidence for breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness.
Highlights
Every ∼90 s (60–120 s range) experience sampling probed state mind wandering and meta-awareness, respectively, with 2 6-point Likert scales, “just where was your attention?” and “how aware were you of where your attention was?.”
Participants were probed for their count
Breath counting accuracy associated with less state mind wandering across participants, r = −0.38, P < 0.001, as predicted for a valid measure of mindfulness. To examine these relationships at a finer timescale within participants, we investigated whether increased meta-awareness and diminished mind wandering were occurring in the very moments when mindfulness was present
Summary
James (1890), a founder of American Psychology wrote, “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. Research on the education of voluntarily bringing back a wandering mind has evoked both promise and controversy. Self-report on the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al, 2006) cannot distinguish individuals receiving Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction vs a validated active control intervention (MacCoon et al, 2012) because both interventions increase reported mindfulness (MacCoon, personal communication). Mindfulness trainings and monetary incentives increase certain cognitive test scores, suggesting that the demand characteristics inherent in mindfulness training studies may result in training studies measuring effects of nonspecific factors such as motivation as opposed to, or at least in addition to, mindfulness (Jensen et al, 2012). It is unclear the extent to which mindfulness per se is captured by self-report or responsible for improvements following putative mindfulness trainings
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