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

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship on mindfulness casts it as a form of purely non-evaluative 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 introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life.

Keywords: Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory; affective science; broaden-and-build; emotion regulation; eudaimonic well-being; interoception; mindfulness; positive emotion; post-traumatic growth; reappraisal; upward spiral.

Figures

Figure 1

A graphical depiction of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory: a process model of mindful positive emotion regulation. As this process unfolds over time, an increase in the width of the spiral denotes an increasing magnitude and depth of eudaimonic well-being. First, the practice of mindfulness meditation facilitates decentering from stress appraisals into the non-evaluative, metacognitive state of mindfulness, which deautomatizes habitual cognitive sets and induces positive affective tone, thereby broadening the scope of attention to encompass previously unattended contextual information. Positive tuning of the attentional system garners new data with which to formulate a positive reappraisal of the stressor, resulting in positive emotions which may then be savored to infuse eudaimonic, implicational meaning into hedonic processing of contextual features supporting the reappraisal. This cycle ultimately leads to productive reengagement with stressful life events, adaptive or prosocial action, and a sense of meaningfulness in life.

Figure 2

Panel A: the emotional spiral; illustrating the distinction between mindful and appraisal orientations. The mindful orientation engages attention towards unappraised sensation, representing a neutral point along the spiral, whereas appraisal orientations serve to mobilize attentional and emotional resources, shifting emotional context either up or down the spiral. Bubbles with plus (+) or minus (−) signs represent positively and negatively appraised experiences, respectively. In the face of an unambiguously stressful life event, what varies is the number of other experiences (i.e., positive events and stimuli) available to awareness with which one may construct positive reappraisals to moderate the emotional context. The emotional context is the total set of appraisals that occupy working memory, which over time are ‘packaged’ into longer term memory as situational meanings. Panel B: the conventional appraisal orientation; each step in the cycle constrains and determines the following step, mutually constraining the deployment of attention and broader contextual meaning. Panel C: a schematic of the deployment of mindful attention; inhibiting the occurrence of appraisal and reorienting attention towards sensation when it is noticed that appraisal is occurring. Panel D: the consequence of the mindful orientation; a weakening of habitual appraisal and strengthening more adaptive reappraisals of experience.

Figure 3

The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory in action, as exemplified by a case example from a cancer survivor. As the mindful positive emotion regulatory process unfolds over time, eudaimonic well-being fluctuates as a function of the engagement and disengagement of attentional, appraisal, and valuation mechanisms. Unlike the idealized schema depicted in Figure 1, progress towards eudaimonic meaning is non-linear and often involves multiple iterations of mindful decentering and reappraisal within and across emotion regulatory episodes before a sustainable positive trajectory of well-being can be achieved. Though future upsets and stress appraisals may result in temporary decreases in eudaimonic well-being, hypothetically in the case of a flourishing person the slope of the overall trend line increases as the individual builds self-regulatory skill and learns to construct a sense of meaning in the face of recurrent adversity.