Burning Issues in Dispositional Mindfulness Research

Abstract

The recent development of dispositional mindfulness measures has sparked several contentious issues regarding our understanding of mindfulness, its measurement, and its development. In this chapter, we consider theory and review empirical research to address four burning issues in dispositional mindfulness research. We review both scholarly and empirical research bearing on the meaning of mindfulness, and discuss distinctions between mindfulness and other attention constructs. We review the validity of dispositional mindfulness measures and highlight their convergence with mindfulness inductions and interventions on key outcomes of interest, namely psychological well-being and emotion regulation. We also attempt to show how the widespread deployment of psychometric instruments to measure individual differences in mindfulness has contributed to understanding how mindfulness itself—apart from the methods designed to enhance it—is related to adaptive emotion-relevant outcomes at neural, psychophysiological, and psychological levels of analysis. Finally, we discuss how qualities of mindful attention may develop through developmental and contextual influences, in addition to formal training. Investigating mindfulness as an individual difference has contributed to a developing theory of mindfulness, and has opened the field to topics of inquiry not easily permissible by other means.