We are working to better understand present moment attention and awareness or mindfulness and the mechanisms through which it may contribute to mental health.

Mindfulness research represents an exciting domain of basic and clinical science at the interface of attention, consciousness, and mental health. Grounded in Buddhist thought traditions, mindfulness entails meditative practices and related mental states characterized present moment attention and awareness characterized by particular qualities or attitudes (e.g., nonjudgment, curiosity, willingness). We and others have argued that, despite its promise, the field’s capacity to rigorously study mindfulness and to reveal mechanism by which mindfulness impacts mental health are in urgent need of transformative advances in the methods/technology used to measure and thereby study these processes. Indeed, mindfulness research has been largely dependent on subjective self-report measurement methods (e.g., questionnaires) or inferred from experimental instructions or functional brain activation (e.g., reverse inference). Accordingly, we are working and have made initial progress to (i) identify and conceptually characterize key cognitive and affective processes integral to mindfulness and its mechanism of action (e.g., meta-awareness, decentering, self-referential processing, equanimity); (ii) to develop novel cognitive-experimental and behavioral methods to measure these processes (e.g., novel implicit cognition methods, signal detection theory methods, laboratory analogue experimental methods, intensive experience sampling, phenomenological methods); and (iii) to apply these novel methods to rigorously study the practice and process of mindfulness and its mechanisms of action for mental health.