Research
Mindfulness
A first line of work concerns individual differences in dispositional mindfulness (that is, natural variations between individuals in how mindful they are). IWe have three lines of research here. The first concerns a necessary broadening of the concept of mindfulness, from a unidimensional trait to a manifold. Mindfulness is traditionally described as a form or quality of attention—the ability or propensity to engage in “nonelaborative, non-judgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged” (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 232). Recent theoretical work within the field (summarized in Vago & Silbersweig, 2012, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) has converged on the conclusion that mindfulness is a complex concept, more akin to a manifold than to a singular construct, and comprises at least three facets: (a) a change in self-awareness, that is, recognizing automatic habits and patterns of reactivity, as well as an increased awareness of momentary states of body and mind; (b) a change in self-regulation, including regulation of emotions, heightened self-compassion, and increased nonattachment and acceptance; and (c) increased self-transcendence, exemplified by increased decentering, a stronger awareness of interdependence between self and others, and heightened compassion. We have explored this model in a number of papers.
Second, we increasingly focus on higher-order regulatory processes and prosocial attitudes. Briefly summarized, this work shows that reflective awareness is related to almost every outcome we ever examined. Controlled sense-of-self in the moment, in contrast, is implicated mostly in aspects of functioning related to the self. Self-transcendence is associated with all outcome variables we ever examined—wellbeing, moral foundations, prejudice, wisdom about self and world, and all three virtues. This suggests that while reflective awareness may be the primary driver of beneficial outcomes, self-transcendence (as perhaps the culmination of the mindful life) is the true key variable when considering this wider world of positive outcomes, leading to wisdom, flourishing, and enhanced ethical sensitivities.
Third, we have a line of work concerning intervention studies, where we are particularly interested in how mindfulness can lead to self-transcendence and individual changes that might be of benefit to the community.
Cognitive Control
Our current experimental work on aging focuses on cognitive control. Cognitive control concerns dealing with complex tasks in a complex environment, which includes: making sure that only the appropriate stimuli from the environment enter into consciousness; continuously updating the content of working memory; switching between different tasks; coordinating the different actions that need to be performed; and switching back and forth between relevant stimuli.
Meta-Analyses of Aging
What happens to people's minds as they grow older? The very simple answer is that many things that we consider to be 'fluid' aspects of cognition (memory, attention, reasoning ability) go down; but aspects of cognition that rely on accumulation of knowledge, sometimes called 'crystallized' cognition (vocabulary scores, experience-specific tasks) stay relatively stable. The more complicated question concerning fluid cognition is: Does it all go together when it goes? The surprising part is that we really don't know. Meta-analysis can help with an answer to the question whether or not it all goes together when it goes... Meta-analysis basically refers to gathering a large amount of data from multiple sources (typically published articles) and pooling them to answer your research questions. Although they are conservative tools, what is good about them is that you can ask really big questions, and answer them on nonsuspect samples, that is, the questions asked in a meta is often not what the original study was focused on.
Creativity and Rumination
We are also interested in the link between creativity, mood disorder, and different types of rumination. Specifically, we claim that (a) people who examine their own lives are prone to depression (we are not the first to find that link); (b) that people who examine their own lives are prone to be creative, both as measured in the type of activities they partake in and in scores on standard creativity tests (it seems we are the first to document this link), and (c) that once the role of self-examination is taken into account, the previously observed link between depression and creativity disappears.
