Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Mindfulness has received an increasingly large amount of attention in academic research. While the benefits of mindfulness are often cited, certain methodological issues significantly limit interpretation across findings. Here, we seek to address this concern through the development of a behavioral measure of emotional acceptance (i.e., a fundamental component of mindfulness). Drawing on behavioral economics, we attempt to develop a measure of emotion regulation choice behavior called the Willingness to Experience Task (WILTEX) in which participants make a series of binary choices between accepting emotion or engaging it with an alternative strategy. Across 5 studies, we demonstrate that individuals are no less likely to avoid emotional acceptance than they are to avoid other emotion regulation strategies. Implications for conceptualizing and measuring mindfulness are discussed.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Amanda M Ferguson
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2793568921