Dismantling Mindfulness: Contributions of Attention vs. Acceptance

Meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, is one of the most popular Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies for alleviating emotional stress, depression and anxiety. While standardized meditation-based treatment packages like Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) have reliably shown sustained improvements in emotional disturbances and wellbeing, they contain so many different components and practices that the active ingredient cannot be ascertained. What is commonly called "Mindfulness" meditation is actually comprised of two separate practices: 1) focused awareness practice (FA), and 2) open-monitoring practice (OM). This project aims to create separate 8 week programs for FA and OM meditations, compare their clinical efficacy and investigate their separate mechanisms of action in individuals with clinically significant levels of persistent negative affect and depression. The clinical benefit and mechanism of action of focused awareness (FA) vs open-monitoring (OM) vs MBCT will be examined with a 3-armed randomized control trial of these 8 week interventions. Outcome variables include negative affect (depression, anxiety, stress) and wellbeing. Hypothesized mediating processes include objectively measured attention, emotion regulation and the basic wakefulness on which they depend.