Abstract
Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of trait mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) shows that mindfulness is assumed to relate to emotional positivity, quality social interactions, prosocial orientation and attention to sensory perceptions. In Study 2, 185 participants completed a gold-standard, self-reported mindfulness measure (the FFMQ) and underwent naturalistic observation sampling to assess their daily behaviors. Trait mindfulness was robustly related to a heightened perceptual focus in conversations. However, it was not related to behavioral and speech markers of emotional positivity, quality social interactions, or prosocial orientation. These findings suggest that the subjective and self-reported experience of being mindful in daily life is expressed primarily through sharpened perceptual attention, rather than through other behavioral or social differences. This highlights the need for ecological models of how dispositional mindfulness “works” in daily life, and raises questions about the measurement of mindfulness.
Highlights
Our study examined how trait mindfulness, as measured with a widely used self-report measure, relates to four domains of behavior with theoretical relevance to mindfulness that can be reliably assessed through the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method: a (1) perceptual orientation, (2) emotional orientation, (3) interpersonal orientation, and (4) prosocial orientation
Study 1 provides evidence that laypersons assume that mindfulness relates to (1) attention to sensory perceptions, (2) emotional positivity, (3) quality social interactions, and (4) a prosocial orientation in daily life
This study was motivated by the observation that mindfulness is robustly linked to well-being [1, 2], yet little is known about how trait mindfulness surfaces behaviorally in daily life
Summary
“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. (. . .) Mindfulness means being awake. Maybe most critically, the experience of mindfulness itself may affect the accuracy with which individuals report on their behavior, which introduces systematic error [19] In light of these limitations and the often decried lack of research on actual, real-world behavior [23], the present research used a naturalistic observation method, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) [24, 25], to capture participants’ behavior and interactions directly, unobtrusively, and objectively within the natural pursuit of their lives. Our study examined how trait mindfulness, as measured with a widely used self-report measure, relates to four domains of behavior with theoretical relevance to mindfulness that can be reliably assessed through the EAR method: a (1) perceptual orientation (referencing sensory perceptions such as sight, sound or touch), (2) emotional orientation (expressing emotional positivity rather than negativity), (3) interpersonal orientation (having meaningful, substantive conversations), and (4) prosocial orientation (expressing gratitude and affection, not engaging in gossip or complaining). The data and code for reproducing the reported analyses for Study 1 are posted on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/n7azr/
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