Dispositional mindfulness: Dissociable affective and cognitive processes

Nancy Tsai; Isaac N Treves; Clemens C C Bauer; Ethan Scherer; Camila Caballero; Martin R West; John D E Gabrieli

doi:10.3758/s13423-024-02462-y

Dispositional mindfulness: Dissociable affective and cognitive processes

Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Feb 1. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02462-y. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Nancy Tsai¹, Isaac N Treves², Clemens C C Bauer^{2

3}, Ethan Scherer⁴, Camila Caballero⁵, Martin R West⁴, John D E Gabrieli^{2

4

6}

Affiliations

¹ McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. ntsai@mit.edu.
² McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, 805 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA, 02139, USA.
⁴ Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA.
⁶ MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.

PMID: 38302789
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-024-02462-y

Abstract

Mindfulness has been linked to a range of positive social-emotional and cognitive outcomes, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. As one of the few traits or dispositions that are associated with both affective and cognitive benefits, we asked whether mindfulness is associated with affective and cognitive outcomes through a shared, unitary process or through two dissociable processes. We examined this in adolescents using behavioral measures and also reanalyzed previously reported neuroimaging findings relating mindfulness training to either affect (negative emotion, stress) or cognition (sustained attention). Using multivariate regression analyses, our findings suggest that the relationships between dispositional mindfulness and affective and cognitive processes are behaviorally dissociable and converge with neuroimaging data indicating that mindfulness modulates affect and cognition through separate neural pathways. These findings support the benefits of trait mindfulness on both affective and cognitive processes, and reveal that those benefits are at least partly dissociable in the mind and brain.

Keywords: Adolescents; Affect; Cognition; Mindfulness; Stress.