Where Mindfulness Research Came From

Attention training practices are old and belong to several religious and philosophical traditions. Their arrival in psychological research is recent, and the route matters for understanding what the research does and does not show.

The translation into a variable

To be studied by the methods of the field, a practice has to become a variable: something that can be delivered in a standard form, measured, and compared against something else. The standardisation took the form of structured programmes with fixed durations and curricula, and the measurement took the form of self-report scales asking about the quality of everyday attention.

Both moves involved a narrowing. The programmes are secularised and time-limited versions of practices normally embedded in a wider tradition, and the scales measure a self-described trait that may or may not correspond to what practitioners of those traditions mean by the term. That is not a criticism of the research so much as a fact about what it can address.

The methodological argument

The strongest internal criticism of this area has been about comparison conditions. If a structured programme is compared against nothing at all, any effect includes the effects of attention, expectation, structure and group contact. Later work has taken this seriously and used active comparisons designed to match those features, and effect sizes are generally smaller under those conditions than under waiting-list comparisons.

A related concern is measurement circularity: many scales ask people to rate qualities the training explicitly teaches them to notice and to name, so training can change the score partly by changing the vocabulary.

What is fair to say

It is fair to say that this is now a substantial research literature with recognised methodological problems that the field has itself identified and is working on. It is not fair to say either that the practices have been shown to do the wide range of things claimed for them in popular coverage, or that the area is empty. Those two verdicts are both easier to write than the accurate one.

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