Dear Dr. Lonny Meinecke

I highly appreciate your idea of examining the role of mindfulness in health and well-being by integrating the temporal aspect of the phenomenon.

Such effort will really be helpful in developing new insights into the processes and mechanism underlying human health and well-being.

Though, time perspective has been explored in relation to trait mindfulness in several earlier researches (e.g., see the following link), the mindfulness per se in different time perspective has probably not been studied well in relation to health.

http://essay.utwente.nl/62422/1/Vowinckel%2C_J.C._-_s0160067_%28verslag%29.pdf

However, I think it would be better to reflect more carefully on the questions raised by you before giving any specific comment or view. I have forwarded the link to this thread to the co-authors with the request to share their views.

After reading your post (in question form), I think that it will be better to conceptualize both mindfulness and subjective well-being as a state and to examine how and to what extent the past, present, and future oriented mindfulness and affective experiences correlate with each other.

I would like to share the ideas that are emerging at the moment.

I completely agree with your idea that our evaluation of the present is associated with evaluative doubts and perhaps the past and the future interact in defining the 'present' (at least when the evaluation of present involves affective experiences).

Thus, I view that the available tool to assess the time perspective or time orientation lack behind in taping the notion of the 'present' as conceptualized by you.

Just to have first hand experience I took my self the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (http://www.thetimeparadox.com/surveys/). While filling the inventory I could not find any instance when the past, present, and/or the future thoughts and experiences did not interacted in making decision about any item. So, my score on this inventory for even the present may not be in true sense the score of the present.

I, therefore, consider that operationalization and measurement of time oriented evaluation of affective experience is a challenging task inasmuch as it is difficult to control the influence of other times (say past) on the evaluation of a given time (say present).

Despite these issues, I think that with the available measures and tools (with some modifications as and when needed) we can address the research issue raised here.

For instance, the positive state mindfulness scale (developed by Timothy D. Ritchie · Fred B. Bryant) using past, present and future version may be used to assess the state mindfulness for different time perspective. The Temporal Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener) can be used to assess the cognitive aspect of subjective well-being for the three time frames. Similarly, the PANAS can be modified to assess the postive and negative affect for past, present, and future. Using such measures, we may have some data and findings to think further and develop future strategies to address the issue at hand.

I am really thankful to you for initiating a very interesting and fruitful discussion related to assessment of positive anticipation and its role in understanding human health by creating different yet related threads on RG.

Many thanks Prof Pandey, and also for the additional Vowinckel article. These additional directions provided by you and Tim Ritchie have already been so helpful in elaborating the current focus of studies, and how much has been done on instruments already (ZTPI, BTPS, NMR, PSMS, SBI, etc). I have read through the Zimbardo article (1999) and was so surprised to find similar thoughts, and also am now going through William James TP chapter (XV) who was in Zimbardo's references. It is so encouraging to see such amazing figures suggesting such similar views on the potential role of time in consciousness - perhaps this is a kind of unavoidable path to the same basic conclusion?

To achieve positive mindfulness in the present, one must already have held a positive rate expectation sufficient to nonconsciously attend to elicitation cues - so I am thinking that, if theory is close, present mindfulness is already too late to achieve that; it is a predictive potential rather than a state/achievement of purpose in the fleeting present - isn't it? In order to savor the moment, we must possess a history of vigilance for the best of moments, so that we are prepared to appreciate them when they come. To me, this is present mindfulness, just as most if not all our thinking and behavior in the present tense is predicted and practiced in the past when there is much more time. James suggests this too – in order to “see” the whole of the parts, they must already have all occurred for us to chunk them, so summary feelings must occur for stimuli in the past, not the present. When you took the ZTPI survey and when I went through it myself, I think we felt this same sense.

This mindfulness is a kind of affective performance we learn as a life skill, so it is exciting to see this direction already well underway. When we treasure the things we look forward to, we involve a span of time much wider than their transience in the present (which seems to escape our grasp, like grief). And that provides a potential pool of pleasant nostalgia, which seems itself just as predictively measurable by the frequency and intensity of cues we recall from the past. At least that is my hope, that we will look at all this larger space of time before and after our best moments, and find happiness lasting a lot longer than just that little time our joy was here.

Dear Lonny Meinecke and Rakesh Pandey,

I am happy to have found this inspiring conversation and I am thankful for your interest in my thesis. I agree on the notion that assessing individual differences in interpretation and connotations of the concept of 'the present' is both crucial and not easily accomplished. The 'real present' defined as a singular 'point' cannot be the object of subjective experience (James). The 'present' that we are able to subjectively experience, referred to as 'specious present' (Clay, James), is an interval which also includes aspects of the very near past, rather than being a single cutout of reality.

At this moment I am working on my master thesis. The purpose of that project is the creation of a 'positive present' time perspective scale, which by now is absent in time perspective assessment. To conceptualize 'positive present', aspects of mindfulness and flow are combined to approach a healthy relation to the subjectively experienced present, which we assume to facilitate positive mental health. With this project we aim at operationalizing a 'relation to the present', which is more strongly linked to eudaimonic subjective well-being, compared to the present-hedonistic time perspective from the ZTPI, which is linked to hedonic subjective well-being.

The article 'Mental health and mindfulness: Mediational role of positive and negative affect' is very inspiring and I surely will cite it in my thesis.

I would strongly appreciate to continue this conversation and if you are interested, I would like to share ideas on this psychological and philosophical subjects with you.