ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how mindfulness researchers in turn could profit from integrating social psychological theory and methodology into their work. As much as social psychology is concerned with the interplay of automatic and controlled processing, it is concerned with self-related processes. In addition to contributing to theory in social psychology, research on mindfulness can further inform applications to target critical societal issues. Social psychology is strongly concerned with fine-grained analyses of the specific psychological mechanisms that underlie our experiences and behaviour. The concept of mindfulness was introduced in Western psychology in the late 70s by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a medical scientist at the University of Massachusetts. A large number of studies in the mindfulness literature have examined the relationship between mindfulness and other variables in correlational designs, making it impossible to draw conclusions about causality. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
