Observing Minds Lab مختبر مراقبة الدماغ המעבדה לתודעה מתבוננת
Mindful Awareness Task (MAT)
The Mindful Awareness Task (MAT) is a behavioral and phenomenological task that measures the objects and time-course of mindful awareness. During the MAT participants perform a 20-min mindfulness meditation (combined open monitoring with focused attention), in which they are instructed (a) to monitor a wide range of prominent present moment experiences (e.g. sensations, emotions, thoughts), and (b) to direct their awareness to their breath when they do not notice any experience. To measure performance during the meditation, participants are instructed (a) to verbally state a label describing each experience they notice (e.g. ‘warm’, ‘calm’, ‘tension’, or ‘thinking’), and (b) to press a button when they notice their inhalation or exhalation (see Figure).
Meta-awareness, and mindful awareness of body, mind, pleasant and unpleasant hedonic tone are scored using manualized qualitative coding of the content of participant’s verbal labels (see Figure). The number of labels reflecting meta-awareness, and mindful awareness of body, mind, pleasant and unpleasant hedonic tone are tallied to produce five individual difference scores reflecting mindful awareness of these experiential objects.
To quantify the time-course of mindful awareness, the precise timing and order of all reports of mindful awareness (i.e. labels and button presses) are analyzed to divide and classify the 20-min meditation into mindful sequences and mindless sequences. Time periods in which participants continuously indicate mindful awareness via verbal labels and button presses are classified as mindful sequences (see Figure). A total mindful awareness time score is computed by summing the duration of all mindful sequences in the 20-min meditation, and a sustained mindful awareness score is computed by averaging the duration of all mindful sequences. Time periods in which participants do not provide any indication of mindful awareness – no button presses indicating awareness of the breath and no verbal labels reflecting awareness of present moment experience – are classified as mindless sequences (see Figure). A total mindless time score is computed by summing the duration of all mindless sequences in the 20-min meditation. Because participants re-engage in mindful awareness (indicated by a verbal label or a button press) at the end of each mindless sequence, a latency to re-engagement in mindful awareness score was computed by averaging the duration of all mindless sequences in the 20-min meditation (see Figure).
The MAT mindful awareness scores display excellent inter-rater reliability, good internal consistency (split-half reliabilities), construct validity (predicted convergent and discriminant associations with indices of mindful awareness of the objects and time-course of awareness), known-groups validity (i.e. distinguishing mindfulness meditators from non-meditators), and incremental validity (i.e. predicting key criterion variables beyond self-report measures of mindfulness).
Hadash, Y., Bernstein A. (2019). Behavioral assessment of mindfulness: Defining features, organizing framework, and review of emerging methods. Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 229-237. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.01.008
Hadash, Y., Ruimi, L., Harel, O., Bernstein, A. (2019). The Mindful Awareness Task (MAT): A novel behavioral measure of attention and awareness in mindfulness meditation. Paper in preparation
Single Experience and Self Implicit Association Test (SES-IAT)
The SES-IAT (Hadash, Plonsker, Vago, & Bernstein, 2106) is an implicit, behavioral measure of Experiential Self-Referential Processing (ESRP) – the cognitive association of present moment subjective experience (e.g., sensations, emotions, thoughts) with the self; and Experiential Selfless Processing (ESLP) – processing present moment subjective experience without self-referentiality. It is designed to measure ESRP and ESLP by manipulating a specific present moment experience (e.g. an emotion), while measuring participants' cognitive association between her/his self and the manipulated experience using the Single Category-Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT; Karpinski & Steinman, 2006).
We developed and tested a version of this task measuring ESRP and ESLP of fear – the Fear SES-IAT. In the Fear SES-IAT participants are instructed to sort target words presented on a computer monitor into three categories – me, fear and office equipment – by pressing one of two keys on every trial. The categorization task is conducted in two stages: In the congruent stage, the categories me and fear are assigned the same response key; whereas in the incongruent stage, they are assigned different response keys. Fear is elicited using frightening videos presented before each test block, and maintained by monotonic scary background sounds played during test blocks. The SES-IAT scores are computed using Karpinski and Steinmans' (2006) SC-IAT D-score algorithm, and subtracting congruent from incongruent blocks.
We found experimental and correlational evidence suggesting that the fear SES-IAT measures ESLP of fear and two forms of ESRP – identification with fear and negative self-referential evaluation of fear (Hadash et al., 2106). High positive D-scores represent identification with fear – experiencing fear as an integral part of the self; Low negative D-scores represent negative self-referential evaluation of fear – not wanting fear; and zero-level D-scores represent ESLP of fear – processing fear without self-referentiality.
Hadash, Y., Plonsker, R., Vago, D., & Bernstein, A. (2016). Experiential Self-Referential and Selfless Processing in Mindfulness and Mental Health: Conceptual Model and Implicit Measurement Methodology. Psychological Assessment.
State Mindfulness Scale (SMS)
The State Mindful Scale (SMS; Tanay & Bernstein, in press). The SMS is a 21-item questionnaire in which respondents indicate on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all to 5 = very well) their perceived level of awareness and attention to their present experience during a specific period of time (i.e., past 15 minutes) and context (e.g., following mindfulness meditation or other activity). The SMS is a novel measure of state-level present moment-to-moment mindfulness, recently developed to index mindfulness as conceptualized within Buddhist and some contemporary cognitive-behavioral scholarship. The SMS is based on a unidimensional conceptual model of state mindfulness entailing two inter-related levels of the construct and process. The first level is focused on the objects of mindful attention (i.e., “what” a person attends to). This level includes the two main domains of events or objects of attention of which one may be mindful -- physical sensations (comprising Satipatthana Sutta body and physical sensations, Sample items: "I noticed physical sensations come and go", "I clearly physically felt what was going on in my body") and mental events (comprising Satipatthana Sutta consciousness and mental objects which include emotions, patterns of thoughts and any other internal mental event. Sample items: "I noticed pleasant and unpleasant emotions", "I noticed thoughts come and go"). The second level is focused on the qualities of mindfulness as a meta-cognitive state (i.e., “how” a person attends). Five qualities of mindfulness were derived from Buddhist texts describing mindfulness as a mental state, including: (1) awareness, (2) sensitivity, (3) deliberate attention to the present moment, (4) intimacy or closeness to one’s subjective experience, and (5) curiosity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a hierarchical two-factor solution entailing one higher-order state mindfulness factor. Cross-sectional as well as controlled experimental and prospective research demonstrated the convergent, discriminant, and incremental convergent validity of SMS as well as context-specific prospective stability, construct validity, incremental sensitivity to change, and incremental predictive validity of the SMS.