What is mindfulness? Development of a cross-cultural consensual definition and a cross-cultural measure of mindfulness

Mindfulness has become extremely popular in recent years and there are a vast number of mindfulness training courses available. This is partly because research has demonstrated that learning mindfulness is beneficial for mental health and wellbeing and mindfulness training is even recommended in NHS treatment guidelines for depression. However, despite this, different people define mindfulness in different ways and there are cross-cultural differences in how people think about mindfulness. This also means that it is difficult to measure mindfulness accurately because we first need to agree on what mindfulness is before we can measure it. Measuring mindfulness accurately is important because it will allow us to know how well existing mindfulness training programmes improve mindfulness and it will also allow us to refine mindfulness training programmes so that they can improve all aspects of mindfulness more fully and potentially lead to better outcomes. Both supervisors are clinical psychologists and, during the studentship, there will be the opportunity to gain clinical experience working in the NHS within the Sussex Mindfulness Centre.

Project aims and objectives
This studentship has two aims:
1. To develop a valid and reliable self-report measure of mindfulness in line with a cross-cultural understanding of mindfulness; and,
2. To develop and refine non-self-report measures of mindfulness, including measures using behavioural and psychophysiological methods