Assessing mindfulness skills
Fabrizio Didonna, Valentina Bosio
The traditional practice of mindfulness meditation has been adapted and implemented in several
clinical settings, both medical and psychological, over the last decades as a therapeutic intervention
and integrated into some structured and validated treatment programmes, such as Dialectical
Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive
Therapy (MBCT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
These therapeutic programmes conceptualize mindfulness as a set of skills which can be learned and
practiced in order to reduce psychopathological symptoms and increase individual health and wellbeing.
Although numerous empirical studies have been carried out to verify the clinical effectiveness of
mindfulness-based interventions, much less scientific attention has been paid to the assessment and
rating procedures of this construct and of its cognitive and phenomenological components.
However, tools to rate mindfulness are necessary to understand its nature and its components, as well
as the cognitive mechanisms through which mindfulness training can create a clinical change.
In this paper the authors presented the results of a validation study of the Italian version of the Five
Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) (Baer et al., 2006), a multifactorial rating scale to assess
mindfulness skills. This study has shown that the FFMQ, even in its Italian version, is a valid and
reliable tool and has good psychometric properties.
Keywords
Mindfulness, Assessment, Validation study, Questionnaire.
