Operationalizing Mindfulness Without Unnecessary Attachments

Empirical clinical psychology has learned the hard way that an excessive technological focus combined with a purely outcome-based research program can produce misleading findings and thus a less progressive science. A recent object lesson of this kind are the flaws in our understanding of cognitive therapy that were revealed by belated component (e.g., Jacobson et al., 1996) and process analyses (e.g., Ilardi & Craighead, 1994; Morgenstern & Longabaugh, 2000). As mindfulness and acceptance-based procedures come to the fore, it is important not to repeat this mistake. Ideally, new techniques are fairly direct extensions of theoretical principles derived from sound basic research. In such situations the expected processes are specified a priori and thus can be examined from the very beginning. This allows the field to determine whether new techniques change the targeted processes, whether better outcomes are produced by the techniques, and whether the better outcomes produced are based on the desired changes in targeted processes (Follette, 1995). All three sources of information are critical to the progress of psychology as a scientific and applied discipline. Unfortunately the world is often not ideal. Sometimes an adequate basic science does not exist fromwhich to derive specific target processes, or such data exist but applied researchers are unaware of them. In these conditions, technological innovation is often based on clinical intuition, accidental variation, or mere common sense. Mindfulness research presents an extreme variant of this situation because techniques are being evaluated that originated before modern science itself even existed. In these situations, one of three things has happened: outcome research has proceeded without a serious concern for an analysis of the functional processes of change, a wide variety of possible processes are examined empirically in the hopes that these data will guide a theoretical understanding, or researchers have attempted to generate theories in flight and test them with process data as the research program unfolds. The ‘‘outcomes only’’ solution is the least desirable. The danger of package proliferation and scientific incoherence that is implicit in an outcomes-only approach threatens to overwhelm otherwise positive movements in empirically clinical science, such as the development of empirically supported treatments (ESTs; Chambless et al., 1996) or practice guidelines (Hayes, Follette, Dawes, & Grady, 1995). In that context, it is to the credit of mindfulness and acceptance researchers that they have been seeking another path early in the development of this research program. Arguments can be made for either of the other two approaches (process data, then theory; theory, then process data). Ultimately, the data will decide in either case, but when a field is having a difficult time knowing where to begin, intelligent efforts to develop working models first can be helpful in spurring empirical work. The target article is a good beginning. We will focus our comments on two aspects of this approach: (a) the implications of any functional theoretical analysis for an attachment to specific technology, and (b) the adequacy of the specific theory proposed as an umbrella for research in the area.