Mindfulness, acceptance, and hypnosis: Cognitive and clinical perspectives

The authors propose that hypnosis and mindfulness-based approaches can be used in tandem to create adaptive response sets and to deautomatize maladaptive response sets. They summarize recent research on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based approaches in clinical and nonclinical contexts and propose that the cognitive underpinnings of mindfulness approaches can be conceptualized in terms of the metacognitive basis of mindful attention, Toneatto's elucidation of the Buddhist perspective on cognition, and Kirsch and Lynn's response-set theory. They also suggest that mindfulness can serve as a template for generating an array of suggestions that provides cognitive strategies to contend with problems in living and to ameliorate stress and negative affect more generally. Many of the ideas the authors advance are speculative and are intended to spur additional research and clinical work.

Psychology Department, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York 13905, USA. slynn@binghamton.edu