Clin Psychol Rev
July 26, 2011
Stefan G. Hofmann, Paul Grossman, Devon E. Hinton
945 citations
Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) and compassion meditation (CM) are practices that aim to foster unconditional kindness and compassion. A review of the literature indicates that these practices are associated with increased positive affect and decreased negative affect. Neuroendocrine studies suggest that CM may reduce stress-induced subjective distress and immune response. Neuroimaging findings suggest that LKM and CM may enhance activity in brain areas involved in emotional processing and empathy. Preliminary intervention studies support their use in clinical populations. When combined with empirically supported treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy, LKM and CM may help address psychological problems involving interpersonal processes, including depression, social anxiety, marital conflict, anger, and the strains of long-term caregiving.
Psychological Assessment
January 1, 2011
Paul Grossman
668 citations
Self-report questionnaires that claim to measure mindfulness as a personality trait face serious, possibly intractable problems. These include a lack of external benchmarks to verify what the scales actually measure, poor content validity, and evidence that people's self-ratings do not match their actual behavior. Different mindfulness scales fail to agree with each other, and responses are biased by a person's experience with meditation. The scales may distort and trivialize the original Buddhist concept of mindful awareness, harming both research and the development of mindfulness-based interventions. A deeper understanding of mindfulness, grounded in direct, long-term meditative practice and Buddhist phenomenology, is needed before psychologists attempt to quantify it.
Contemporary Buddhism
May 1, 2011
Paul Grossman, Nicholas T. Van Dam
540 citations
The Buddhist concept of mindfulness, central to many Western psychological interventions, originates from a centuries-old systematic investigation of subjective experience. Current enthusiasm for mindfulness in Western science has led to many different definitions, measurements, and self-report questionnaires that treat it as a stable personality trait. This paper identifies persistent problems with these attempts and warns that they risk distorting, diluting, or reifying the original Buddhist ideas. To properly understand and measure mindfulness, psychologists and scientists may need to study Buddhist phenomenology more deeply and engage in long-term direct practice of insight meditation, a step that seems necessary before any valid characterization or quantification can occur.