Finally research is catching up:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691617709589". We believe that much public confusion and media hype have stemmed from an undifferentiated use of the terms mindfulness and meditation. Each of these terms may refer to an ambiguously broad array of mental states and practices that are associated with a wide variety of secular and religious contexts (Davidson & Kaszniak, 2015; Goleman, 1988). Valid interpretation of empirical results from scientific research on such states and practices must take proper account of exactly what types of mindfulness and meditation are involved. With current use of umbrella terms, a 5-minute meditation exercise from a popular phone application might be treated the same as a 3-month meditation retreat (both labeled as meditation) and a self-report questionnaire might be equated with the characteristics of someone who has spent decades practicing a particular type of meditation (both labeled as mindfulness).
Furthermore, there is a general failure among the public to recognize that scientific consensus is a complex process requiring considerable time, effort, debate, and (most important) data. Throughout the scientific process, the predominant view among scholars can vacillate between being in support of, being agnostic to, and being against a given idea or theory (Shwed & Bearman, 2010). Eager journalists, academic press offices, and news media outlets—sometimes aided and abetted by researchers—have often overinterpreted initial tentative empirical results as if they were established facts. Moreover, statistically “significant” differences have repeatedly been equated with clinical and/or practical significance (cf. Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1989). These critical considerations need to be incorporated constructively in the future development of best practices for conducting mindfulness research, and for promoting accurate scientific communication with the general public (Britton, 2016).
The Problematic Meaning of “Mindfulness”
Despite how it is often portrayed by the media (e.g., Huffington, 2013) and some researchers (Brown & Ryan, 2003), there is neither one universally accepted technical definition of “mindfulness” nor any broad agreement about detailed aspects of the underlying concept to which it refers (Bodhi, 2011; Dreyfus, 2011; Dunne, 2011; Gethin, 2011). Frequently, “mindfulness” simply denotes a mental faculty for being consciously aware and taking account of currently prevailing situations (Kabat-Zinn, 1990; Langer, 1989). At other times, “mindfulness” may refer to formal practice of sitting on a cushion in a specific posture and attending (more or less successfully) to the breath or some other focal object. Considerable disagreement about definitions is not uncommon in the study of complex constructs (for discussion of intelligence, see, e.g., Neisser et al., 1996; for discussion of wisdom, see, e.g., Walsh, 2015) and mindfulness is no exception. Mindfulness is typically considered to be a mental faculty relating to attention, awareness, retention/memory, and/or discernment (cf. Davidson & Kaszniak, 2015); however, these multiple faculties are rarely represented in research practice (Goldberg et al., 2015; Manuel, Somohano, & Bowen, 2017). One of the most thoughtful and frequently invoked definitions states that mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, in the present moment, as nonreactively, nonjudgmentally, and open-heartedly as possible (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, 2011). However, this definition has been described as one of convenience regarding those constructs most readily comprehensible to Western audiences (Kabat-Zinn, 2011)."
