Abstract
A growing body of research indicates that mindfulness training can have beneficial effects on critical aspects of psychological well-being, cognitive function, and brain health. Although these benefits have been generalized to the population level, individual variability in observed effects of mindfulness training has not been systematically investigated. Research on other similar forms of psychological intervention demonstrates that individual differences are prominent in terms of intervention responsiveness and outcomes. Furthermore, individual characteristics such as personality traits have been shown to play a crucial role in influencing the effects of intervention. In light of these lines of evidence, we review representative work on individual differences in mindfulness training and advocate for an individual difference perspective in mindfulness training research. We discuss relevant empirical evidence of individual differences potentially influencing behavioral outcomes of mindfulness training, focusing on both cognitive function and psychological well-being. Finally, theoretical considerations and potentially fruitful research strategies and directions for studying individual differences in mindfulness training are discussed, including those involving cognitive neuroscience methods.
Highlights
Mindfulness training has garnered popularity both within the scientific community, and among the lay public, as an effective intervention that promotes health and well-being
The first section of this paper focuses on personality and dispositional traits, while the second and third sections describe how pre-existing individual differences in emotion regulation and cognitive abilities could influence training effects and outcomes
We have primarily focused on behavioral studies of individual differences related to mindfulness training, but it is worth noting that studies of mindfulness training effects utilizing cognitive neuroscience approaches, though still in their infancy, would benefit from adopting an individual differences perspective in future investigation
Summary
Mindfulness training (or mindfulness-based intervention) has garnered popularity both within the scientific community, and among the lay public, as an effective intervention that promotes health and well-being. Most of the extant literature on mindfulness training has generalized its benefits to the population level, assuming homogeneous effects of training for every individual based on group-averaged results This one-size-fits-all model is in tension with existing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence that have been amassed with regard to individual variability in response to psychological interventions (Caspi and Bell, 2004; Gully and Chen, 2010). Because the goal of individual differences investigation should always be confirmatory, rather than exploratory, it is critical to formulate a priori hypotheses regarding putative variables associated with differential intervention effects (Caspi and Bell, 2004) Employing such a theoretically oriented and hypothesisdriven approach would greatly mitigate the concerns of spurious statistical associations that can result from exploratory, “fishing expedition”-type analyses in which a myriad of putative dispositional traits are queried. According to several theoretical frameworks relating personality traits to intervention outcomes (Anderson, 1998; Chapman et al, 2014), all five dimensions of the Big Five theory have relevance
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