Mind The Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation

By Nicholas T. Van Dam, Marieke K. van Vugt, David R. Vago, Laura Schmalzl, Clifford D. Saron, Andrew Olendzki, T. Meissner, Sara W. Lazar, C. Kerr, Jolie Gorchov and 5 more. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2017

1,311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the past two decades, mindfulness meditation has gone from being a fringe topic of scientific investigation to being an occasional replacement for psychotherapy, tool of corporate well-being, widely implemented educational practice, and “key to building more resilient soldiers.” Yet the mindfulness movement and empirical evidence supporting it have not gone without criticism. Misinformation and poor methodology associated with past studies of mindfulness may lead public consumers to be harmed, misled, and disappointed. Addressing such concerns, the present article discusses the difficulties of defining mindfulness, delineates the proper scope of research into mindfulness practices, and explicates crucial methodological issues for interpreting results from investigations of mindfulness. For doing so, the authors draw on their diverse areas of expertise to review the present state of mindfulness research, comprehensively summarizing what we do and do not know, while providing a prescriptive agenda for contemplative science, with a particular focus on assessment, mindfulness training, possible adverse effects, and intersection with brain imaging. Our goals are to inform interested scientists, the news media, and the public, to minimize harm, curb poor research practices, and staunch the flow of misinformation about the benefits, costs, and future prospects of mindfulness meditation.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4181f571f985a2e8ed2dcf716e265675218ad68e

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Citations in the corpus

The Way Forward in Mindfulness and Sustainability: a Critical Review and Research Agenda (2020, background): “Other researchers warn of the danger to understand mindfulness as a panacea strategy for all ills of our society (Schmidt 2016; Creswell 2017; Kabat-Zinn 2017; Van Dam et al. 2018; Singer and Engert 2019).”
Mindfulness-based interventions in the workplace: An inclusive systematic review and meta-analysis of their impact upon wellbeing (2018, background): “…between heart beats) 0.39 0.10, 0.68 2.61 .0091 132.11 < .0001 86.4 (Continued) can help prevent relapse of depression (Ma & Teasdale, 2004), its efficacy with respect to current depression less well-established (and in fact MBIs are often contraindicated in such contexts; van Dam et al., 2018).”
Mindfulness in Nature Enhances Connectedness and Mood (2019, neutral): “Orienting people toward their present experience is the aim of mindfulness meditation, a practice that has received increased research attention in recent years (Van Dam et al., 2017).”
Assessment of mindfulness by self-report. (2018, background): “Critics have also questioned the psychometric properties of the available questionnaires and highlighted the need for more objective measures [8].”