What do People Mean When They Talk About Mindfulness?

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Mindfulness has become a popular term but as its popularity rises, some people have expressed concerns that mindfulness is being misrepresented or that it is misunderstood. 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 examined the meaning of mindfulness in three of the most extensive linguistic bodies of English language and found that general public's depictions of mindfulness highlight engagement-related processes. Then, we examined past research to see whether awareness and acceptance are related, as theory suggests they should be in order to represent mindfulness-as-engagement. 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 no, or even negative, associations. Further, contrary to the synergistic model of awareness and acceptance contributing to greater engagement, we examined two lay samples (N total = 406) to find that acceptance is either unrelated or inversely related to markers of engagement. To overcome resulting conceptual and methodological challenges, this paper highlights the need for a mindfulness framework that takes the context into consideration whereby acceptance enables the process of engaging with life's challenges rather than avoiding them.

Choi, E., Farb, N., Pogrebtsova, E., Gruman, J., & Grossman, I. (forthcoming) in Clinical Psychological Review.