Measuring Mindfulness: Pilot Studies with the Swedish Versions of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills

The present article describes data from pilot studies with the Swedish versions of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS). The MAAS and two of the KIMS scales, Act with Awareness and Accept without Judgment, were found to correlate in the predicted direction with measures of well-being and emotional distress. The KIMS scales Observe and Describe showed more ambiguous results, possibly because these two scales measure a mixture of two opposite kinds of processes: healthy self-observation (“experiential self-focus”) and unhealthy rumination (“analytical self-focus”). The KIMS was also used in an uncontrolled study with participants in an educational programme for close relatives of persons with borderline personality disorder, Family Connections (FC), which includes components of mindfulness training. The FC participants were found to (a) score lower than a comparison group on Act with Awareness and Accept without Judgment before treatment and (b) show significantly increased scores on Accept without Judgment after treatment.