Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation

Contemporary scholarship on mindfulness casts it as a form of purely nonevaluative engagement with experience. Yet, traditionally mindfulness was not intended to operate in a vacuum of dispassionate observation, but was seen as facilitative of eudaimonic mental states. In spite of this historical context, modern psychological research has neglected to ask the question of how the practice of mindfulness affects downstream emotion regulatory processes to impact the sense of meaning in life. To fill this lacuna, here we describe the mindfulness-to-meaning theory, from which we derive a novel process model of mindful positive emotion regulation informed by affective science, in which mindfulness is proposed to…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Award: R34DA037005