On the Attitudinal Consequences of Being Mindful

Abstract

A series of studies examined whether mindfulness is associated with the experience of attitudinal ambivalence. Studies 1A and 1B found that mindful individuals expressed greater comfort holding ambivalent views and reported feeling ambivalent less often.More mindful individuals also responded more positively to feelings of uncertainty (as assessed in Study 1B). Study 2 replicated these effects and demonstrated that mindful individuals had lower objective and subjective ambivalence across a range of attitude objects, but did not differ in attitude valence, extremity, positivity/negativity, strength, or the need to evaluate. Study 3 showed that the link between greater ambivalence and negative affect was buffered by mindfulness, such that there was no link between the amount of ambivalence and negative affect among more mindful individuals. The results are discussed with respect to the benefits of mindfulness in relation to ambivalence and affect. KEYWORDS: MINDFULNESS, ATTITUDES, AMBIVALENCE Mindfulness and ambivalence 3On the attitudinal consequences of being mindful: Links between mindfulness and attitude ambivalenceWe routinely experience mixed reactions to objects in our environment. At a recent coffee shop visit, the lead author was presented with a free sample of cake. He was tornwhile he likes cake, he knows that such an indulgence is unhealthy. He quietly deliberated before giving the cake to his friend. Of course, people frequently experience ambivalent reactions over more substantial objects, including their racial attitudes, their opinions about important social issues, and their own self-esteem (e.g., Haddock & Gebauer, 2011; van Harreveld, van der Plight, & de Liver, 2009b). Furthermore, the experience of ambivalence is usually associated with negative affect (DeMarree, Wheeler, Briñol, & Petty, 2014;Petty, Briñol, & Johnson, 2012;Rydell, McConnell, & Mackie, 2008). In this paper, we consider links between ambivalence and the construct of mindfulness. Specifically, we address whether individual differences in mindfulness are associated with individuals' comfort about holding ambivalent views, how frequently they report ambivalence, and whether mindfulness buffers the link between the experience of ambivalence and negative affect. Integrating Ambivalence and MindfulnessAmbivalence refers to the extent to which an individual has mixed views about an object. The experience of ambivalence is typically associated with negative affect that individuals are motivated to reduce (Petty et al., 2012;Rydell et al., 2008), similar to how dissonance is postulated to invoke arousal (Festinger, 1957). In one interesting study regarding the ambivalence-negative affect link, van Harreveld, Rutjens, Rotteveel, Nordgren, and vanderPligt (2009a) had participants read a message that contained either Mindfulness and ambivalence 4 univalent or ambivalent information. For ambivalence-induced participants, higher skin conductance was found when participants subsequently made a choice about the topic.Mindfulness i...

Can high quality listening predict lower speakers' prejudiced attitudes?

“…Furthermore, studies on mindful attention ( Haddock et al, 2017 ) describe that high attention is required for self-insight but place less focus on the learning and discovery qualities of interest here. We furthermore differentiate self-insight from insight about events, more broadly.…”

“…Indirect evidence comes from research on mindfulness, which is conceptualized as non-judgmental awareness of the present ( Kabat-Zinn, 2015 ). Specifically, when individuals are mindfully aware of conflictual affect and self-relevant information they show more emotional differentiation ( Hill & Updegraff, 2012 ), better self-regulation ( Erbas et al, 2014 ), and respond more positively to situations of uncertainty ( Haddock et al, 2017 ). Mindful attention has also been linked to changing stereotypes and prejudice (e.g., Djikic et al, 2008 ; Lillis & Hayes, 2007 ; Lueke & Gibson, 2015 ).…”

An Examination of Whether Mindfulness Can Predict the Relationship Between Objective and Subjective Attitudinal Ambivalence

“…We first tried to replicate the past research showing that mindfulness negatively predicts OA and SA (Haddock et al, 2017). To do this, we used cross-classified multilevel models as described above.…”

“…Building off of the idea that mindfulness can reduce inconsistencies (see also Crane et al, 2008), Haddock et al (2017) showed that as mindfulness increased, people reported being more comfortable holding ambivalent attitudes and reported experiencing ambivalent attitudes less often. They also showed that mindfulness predicted less OA and SA across a number of topics (see also Dummel, 2018).…”

The Implicit Misattribution Model of Evaluative Conditioning

“…First and Social Psychological Bulletin | 2569-653X https://doi.org/10.5964/spb.v13i3.27574 foremost, these would be factors that impact source confusability. For example, chronic ambivalence (Haddock, Foad, Windsor-Shellard, Dummel, & Adarves-Yorno, 2017) involves the regular experience of both positive and negative affect toward a variety of objects. It may be that chronically ambivalent individuals are more likely to misattribute any experienced affect.…”