Mindfulness
Present Moment Awareness
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
Mindfulness. It’s a concept which has garnered increasing attention over the past forty years in the West. However, its roots extend much farther back in the East, as it is at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. What does it mean to be mindful? To be mindful can perhaps be best defined as an active and open regard, free of judgement, toward one’s emotions, thoughts, and sensations occurring in the present moment.
Although mindfulness is often associated with the overall trend toward wellness — yoga, clean eating, meditation — it also has increasingly become a focus of psychological research as an alternative intervention to medication, or more structured therapies such as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Perhaps the most important thrusts toward integrating the practice of mindfulness in psychotherapy can be traced to Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfullness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Both therapies incorporate traditional Buddhist elements of mindfulness — an awareness of the present, the uncritical acceptance of the self, the practice of meditation, the ability to view emotion without judgement — in their practice. Empirical evidence has supported the effectiveness of both therapies, which thus offer a viable alternative to traditional talk therapy, and highly structured CBT.
This increased attention on the construct of mindfulness begs one important question. How does one measure mindfulness? A related question, of course, is whether we need to measure mindfulness at all. The answer is that we must learn to measure mindfulness if we are to implement evidence-based treatments that emphasize its practice. There are two reasons for this. The first is that developing psychometric assessments of mindfulness will allow researchers to assess the effectiveness of these interventions. Specifically, such assessment tools would allow researchers and clinicians to assess relative increases or decreases in mindfulness ability or orientation as a result of therapy, and whether or not these fluctuations are correlated with or causally related to improvement, or worsening, of presenting symptoms. Secondly, it is also relevant to assess individuals’ levels of mindfulness prior to interventions, not only in order to assess relative change, but also to assess whether individuals with different pre-existing levels of mindfulness skill respond differentially to such interventions.
Given the increasing prevalence of mindfulness-based therapies, and the obvious importance of the ability to measure mindfulness, what tools can psychologists today employ? There are a number of existing scales today which are designed to address mindfulness. In this article, I will only briefly introduce what are arguably to four most prominent measures currently in use.
Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) The FFMQ, developed by Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney (2006) is a 39-item self-report measure of mindfulness that is widely used and has which has been validated in both community and clinical samples.
Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS) The KIMS, developed by Baer et al. (2004) includes 39 items which assess participants’ general tendency to be mindful in everyday life. Specifically, it was designed for those without any particular training in mindfulness practices, and is therefore useful for use in community samples.
State Mindfulness Scale (SMS) The SMS, developed by Tanay and Berstein (2013), is a 25-item scale designed to reflect both the traditional Buddhist and the contemporary psychological science models of mindfulness.
Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM) The CAMM, developed by Greco, Baer, & Gregory (2011), is a 25-item questionnaire which has developed a developmentally appropriate measure of mindfulness. Scores are correlated with overall quality of life, academic competence, and negatively correlated with both internalizing symptoms and externalizing behavioural problems.
As I believe it has been made evident, mindfulness is a construct in psychology which has gained, and is continuing to gain importance as a novel approach to psychotherapy. Therefore, the development and refinement of our tools to measure this construct will surely continue to evolve in the years to come, and it will be interesting to follow how mindfulness will become incorporate into the psychological, and psychometric, tradition.
Greco, L., Bauer, R., & Smith, G. (2011). Assessing Mindfulness in Children and Adolescents: Development and Validation of the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM). Psychological Assessment, 23(3), 606–614.
Mckee, L., Zvolensky, M., Solomon, S., Bernstein, A., & Leen‐Feldner, E. (2007). Emotional‐Vulnerability and Mindfulness: A Preliminary Test of Associations among Negative Affectivity, Anxiety Sensitivity, and Mindfulness Skills. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 91–101.
Tanay, G., & Bernstein, A. (2013). State Mindfulness Scale (SMS): Development and initial validation. Psychological Assessment,1286–1299.
Williams, M., Dalgleish, T., Karl, A., & Kuyken, W. (2014). Examining the Factor Structures of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Self-Compassion Scale.Psychological Assessment, 26(2), 407–418.
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