After mindfulness is defined, a brief history of the research on the topic to date is reviewed. This work essentially falls into three categories: health, business, and education. Considerations of mindlessness as a social issue are then addressed. A brief introduction to the articles in this issue follows. These articles speak to mindfulness as it relates to potential solutions to social problems.The main purpose of this issue is to offer social scientists and policy makers an alternative lens through which to view and understand the social phenomena and issues that interest them. Although the concept of mindfulness overlaps with many other constructs in psychology (a fuller discussion of this is provided in the following article, by Sternberg), it also offers some unique perspectives on how to investigate psychological processes. The concept of mindfulness and the related concept of mindlessness were introduced to social psychology more than 2 decades ago. They have been applied to many diverse areas, including psychopathology, developmental psychology, education research, political theory, and communication processes, to name a few.
We consider some of the ways in which mindfulness theory can provide new solutions to current problems and address potential future problems that may result from changes in demographics and technology. Specific research questions are suggested to see how increasing mindfulness and decreasing mindlessness can work to diminish these social problems as they occur specifically in the classroom, the workplace, and the social predicament of getting old. We discuss (a) recasting some of the problems of the elderly into problems of perspective about the elderly, (b) mindful ways of dealing with increased ethnic diversity, (c) differentiating between changing the workplace work and changing the character of the work itself and (d) the advantages and ways of increasing mindfulness in the classroom.This issue of Journal of Social Issues has reviewed a diverse range of research areas that have benefited from a mindfulness perspective. In this article, we will suggest some future direction and questions for research in this area, based upon both the work of the investigators represented in this issue and some recent work in our own laboratory.We believe that mindfulness theory should enable us to change both individuals and institutions in two ways: (a) by increasing mindfulness and (b) decreasing mindlessness. The first is a direct approach aimed at implementing new programs and procedures that take as their goal an increase in our awareness of multiple
The potential of literature to increase empathy was investigated in an experiment. Participants (N = 100, 69 women) completed a package of questionnaires that measured lifelong exposure to fiction and nonfiction, personality traits, and affective and cognitive empathy. They read either an essay or a short story that were equivalent in length and complexity, were tested again for cognitive and affective empathy, and were finally given a non-self-report measure of empathy. Participants who read a short story who were also low in Openness experienced significant increases in self-reported cognitive empathy (p .05). No increases in affective empathy were found. Participants who were frequent fiction-readers had higher scores on the non-self-report measure of empathy. Our results suggest a role for fictional literature in facilitating development of empathy.
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