Development of a self-distancing task and initial validation of responses

Abstract

Mindfulness-based interventions are believed to counteract cognitive biases that exacerbate cognitive and physiological reactivity to emotional experiences and that contribute to the development and persistence of psychopathology. One process by which mindful practices may produce such salutary effects is by enhancing the capacity to "decenter"-or to adopt a self-distanced, nonjudgmental perspective on conscious experiences (e.g., thoughts, memories, and feelings). Findings consistently indicate that decentering, assessed via self-report, represents an important aspect of mental health and well-being; however, numerous researchers have called for more objective measures of skills associated with mindfulness and decentering to further evaluate the mechanisms and benefits of mindfulness-based practices. Thus, in the current investigation, we developed a behavioral task that requires mental manipulation of negative emotional (and neutral) material away from the self (self-distancing), as a means to assess the skills associated with mindfulness and decentering that likely underlie healthy emotional processing. In 2 nonmeditating, university samples, we found that higher levels of self-reported mindfulness and higher levels of 1 facet of decentering (the capacity to adopt a distanced perspective on experiences) predicted behavioral indicators of self-distancing. Results suggest that the self-distancing task shows considerable promise for capturing skills associated with mindfulness and at least 1 element of decentering. (PsycINFO Database Record