284 Part III Humanistic/Existential Theories
Comfort with Solitude, and Openness to Experience. They also completed the SISA,
derived from the Personal Orientation Inventory. In addition, the students completed
two measures of mindfulness. The first, the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness
Skills (KIMS; Baer et al., 2004), assesses four features of mindfulness: observing,
describing, acting with awareness, and accepting without judgment. The Mindful
Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003) asks participants indirect
questions about being attentive and aware. This is because preliminary research
revealed that asking people to directly endorse mindfulness statements led to inflated
estimates. This scale, instead, asks questions about mindlessness, and hence gets at
people’s levels of mindfulness indirectly (e.g., “I find it difficult to stay focused on
what’s happening in the present”; “I rush through activities without being really
attentive to them”).
Results revealed a significant positive correlation between both the MAAS
mindfulness measure and the most general SISA self-actualization measure. So the
more mindful participants reported themselves to be, the higher they scored on the
general measure of self-actualization. Second, the relationships between the factors of
the BISA-R and the mindfulness measures revealed that the acceptance feature of
mindfulness and the autonomy feature of self-actualization were the driving factors
among all the variables of interest. The authors state: “The strong relationship
between acceptance and autonomy suggests that the highly non-judgmental, non
self-critical individual is also quite independent and self-confident in ways that support
self-actualization” (Beitel et al., 2014, p. 198). Several null findings in this study were
also interesting. One of them was that the mindfulness feature of non-judgmental
acceptance was not related to self-actualization generally nor to openness to experience.
Maslow’s theorizing around the self-actualization process seems to fit with this: mind-
ful practice may, in fact, be antithetical to the goal oriented features of the process of
engaging the B-values in self-actualization, because some judging of “good and bad”
or “right and wrong” is likely part and parcel of that self-development process.
Because this study was correlational in nature, we cannot say which comes
first. Do self-actualizers become more mindful? Or does the practice of mindful-
ness launch us into and support the process of self-actualizing? In any case, the
positive relationship between these two important constructs provides a fascinating
link between Buddhism and humanistic psychology. Future research will need to
explore the direction of causality between mindfulness and self-actualization.Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is a relatively new field of psychology that combines an empha-
sis on hope, optimism, and well-being with scientific research and assessment. Many
of the questions examined by positive psychologists stem directly from humanistic
theorists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (see Chapter 10). Like Maslow
and Rogers, positive psychologists are critical of traditional psychology, which has
resulted in a model of the human being as lacking the positive features that make life
worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, respon-
sibility, and positive experiences are ignored (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
One area of positive psychology where Maslow’s ideas have been par-
ticularly influential is in the role of positive experiences in people’s lives.