Self-Regulation of Attention May Unify Theories of Mindfulness

The study of mindfulness proceeds from a number of perspectives. Two of the best-known academic conceptualizations of mindfulness are those identified with Kabat-Zinn and Langer. These conceptions, meditative and sociocognitive, have been built from different foundations and have been argued to be quite distinct. However, it has been suggested that they may be related through a shared component of self-regulation of attention. To put this hypothesis to a test, a convenience sample of participants (n = 208) were asked to complete the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), Langer Mindfulness Scale (LMS), and the Self-Regulation Scale (SRS), a measure of the self-regulation of attention. These three dispositional measures were shown to be correlated, suggesting that reliance on the capacity to regulate attention in pursuit of a goal is shared by these two approaches to mindfulness. On further analysis, the correlation between FFMQ and the LMS was found to be higher for those participants with the highest SRS scores. The implications of this somewhat counter-intuitive finding are discussed.