Dispositional Mindfulness in Daily Life: A Naturalistic Observation Study

Abstract

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of trait mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) shows that mindfulness is assumed to relate to emotional positivity, quality social interactions, prosocial orientation and attention to sensory perceptions. In Study 2, 185 participants completed a gold-standard, self-reported mindfulness measure (the FFMQ) and underwent naturalistic observation sampling to assess their daily behaviors. Trait mindfulness was robustly related to a heightened perceptual focus in conversations. However, it was not related to behavioral and speech markers of emotional positivity, quality social interactions, or prosocial orientation. These findings suggest that the subjective and self-reported experience of being mindful in daily life is expressed primarily through sharpened perceptual attention, rather than through other behavioral or social differences. This highlights the need for ecological models of how dispositional mindfulness “works” in daily life, and raises questions about the measurement of mindfulness.

‘Personality in its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled, Multi–sample Examination of the Relationships between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

“…Next, our assessment of behaviour is limited to what can be (i) assessed from sampling ambient sounds (i.e. lack of visual information from photo or video Sherman, Rauthmann, Brown, Serfass, & Jones, 2015) and (ii) extracted via coding and text analysis from the raw ambient sounds (Kaplan et al, 2018). Future research should build on our analyses, which used LIWC to get at linguistic markers of the Big Five by employing more computationally advanced, bottom–up text analysis methods (n–grams and topic models) that can reveal subtle language patterns that escape dictionary–based approaches (Iliev, Dehghani, & Sagi, 2015; Schwartz et al, 2015).…”

“…Participants completed a measure of the Big Five personality traits before and after the 8–week meditation intervention 2 and wore the EAR for up to four non–consecutive days (two weekends, separated by the 8–week intervention) with a recording rate of either 50 seconds every 9 minutes or 30 seconds every 12 minutes. For more details on this sample, see Kaplan et al (2018).…”

Best practices for Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) research: A practical guide to coding and processing EAR data

“…For instance, in a study of breast cancer survivors, we expanded the interaction partner module to capture interactions with participants' medical providers, and in a study of behavioral manifestations of meditation training, we expanded the activity module to include when participants were meditating. We have also designed new, project-specific modules to capture, for example, breast cancer survivors' interactions with their support networks (e.g., positive and negative received support; Robbins et al, 2014), and pro-social behaviors in the context of meditation training (gratitude, affection; Kaplan et al, 2018). In recent projects, we have further expanded the SECSI system to assess family-level environments and interactions (e.g., Alisic et al, 2015;Mascaro, Rentscher, A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CODING AND PROCESSING EAR DATA 8 Hackett, Mehl, Rilling, 2017), which required significant modifications to the basic coding system in order to capture the complexities of daily family life.…”

Opposite effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on sustained attention in individuals with high and low levels of dispositional mindfulness

“…While mindfulness is often studied by comparing meditators and non-meditators, or by measuring the effect of a mindfulness training intervention, mindfulness is present, and varies across individuals, irrespective of whether they practice mindfulness meditation. Dispositional mindfulness, sometimes regarded as a trait, can be measured using various questionnaires (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006;Baer et al, 2008;Neuser, 2010;Tang, Hölzel, & Posner, 2016;Zhuang et al, 2017), allowing correlational studies (e.g., Kaplan et al, 2018) or the comparison of participants with different levels of mindfulness on some variable of interest such as performance in an attentional task. There are, however, very few studies examining the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and attention, and their findings are mixed.…”