The control and measure of mindfulness as a metacognitive practice

<p dir="ltr">Building on a definition of mindfulness as a metacognitive practice, we compare such a practice to a less-metacognitive mindfulness of the world control intervention, and a waitlist group, across two studies. More data is required and so strong conclusions must be withheld, although we find some evidence in the direction of our hypothesis on a scale measure of depression. Having said this, Mindfulness of the World appears to perform perfectly adequately so far, which might be taken as evidence for the centrality of the placebo effect in mindfulness, or else as the results of a new intervention in its own right. We also develop a new measure of mindfulness, the BCT-M, and although correlations with other tasks are at present low, we propose several improvements which might be made to improve the properties of this initially promising measure. We also introduce a measure of the metacognition of working-memory, a forced-choice digit-span task, which is amenable to staircasing. Again, we record some problematic results, but are hopeful that several suggested design improvements might make this task worthwhile to future research. Correlations between domains were found to be as high as those within them, providing preliminary evidence for the domain-generality of metacognition, although we also find some explanatory power at the lower-level of task design rather than cognitive domains, questioning such results. Building on previous research, we confirm YN tasks are perfectly suited to correlations with other tasks under the appropriate response-specific analysis, although caution that response-alternatives might vary in their properties for reasons beyond simply the 'yes' and 'no' options given to participants. Updates to of state-of-the-art algorithms for detecting the domain generality of metacognition should allow for greater flexibility in task design in future.</p>