Mindfulness as a general topic of scientific inquiry has emerged as an increasingly popular topic for social scientists, educators, and psychologists in the last 30 years. To illustrate this growing interest, one need only search for peer-reviewed publications using “mindfulness” as the primary search term. Figure 1 displays publications in academic journals that were retrieved using PsychINFO and “mindfulness” as the keyword. As of November 2015, over three thousand scientific articles have been published (n = 3,350), with about one third of these articles having been published just in the last 2 years alone. What is also striking about the data displayed in this graph is not just the sheer volume of the work that is emerging, but also that the research appears to be growing at an exponential rate, suggesting an accelerating interest in the field among scholars. Indeed, given that so much time and energy is being devoted to the study of mindfulness, researchers have proposed the creation of new disciplines entirely devoted to the subject, coining such terms as contemplative science (Wallace 2006) and mindfulness psychology (Felver et al. 2013), and an entire journal (i.e., Mindfulness) is now devoted solely to the topic. However, although the Western scientific inquiry into the construct labeled as mindfulness has clearly established itself as a general domain in social science, there remains ample opportunity to investigate how mindfulness can be applied and studied within specific subsamples and in specific settings.
Fig. 1
Publications in academic journals with keyword “mindfulness”
