A brief nonattachment intervention based on the three marks of existence: development, rationale, and initial evidence

ABSTRACT

Background

The practices described in Buddhist philosophy are essentially a suite of non-theistic cognitive and behavioral interventions designed to induce nonattachment (N-A), which can be defined in terms of the absence of a need for one’s personal reality to be other than it is. Although meditative practices have received attention in multiple literatures, the cognitive analogs to these behaviorally-oriented practices have not.

Design

Two experiments involving undergraduate participants (total N = 239; M age = 19.04) investigated whether the provision of wisdom related to the Three Marks of Existence (i.e., some degree of suffering is inevitable, there is impermanence, and many events are not in our control) could result in (1) higher nonattachment attitudes, (2) lower threat appraisals, (3) lower stressor reactivity, and (4) shorter emotion reaction durations.

Results

With moderate to large effect sizes, the Three Marks trainings (relative to placebo or control conditions) resulted in (1) higher nonattachment attitudes, (2) lower threat appraisals, (3) no differences in negative emotional intensity, but 4) shorter emotion durations.

Conclusions

These results provide preliminary evidence that enduring cognitive trainings such as the Three Marks can be an effective tool to increase acceptance-related attitudes while attenuating negative reactivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonattachment
• acceptance
• cognitive intervention
• emotion reactivity
• emotion dynamics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Mr. Joseph Goldstein, whose work formed the basis for the current Three Marks inductions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

All studies were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the university at which the research took place.

Data availability statement

All related or relevant data will be accessible via the OSF website at the time of publication.

Code availability

All related or relevant code will also be accessible via the OSF website at the time of publication.

Author contributions

R. J. K. developed the study concepts and all authors contributed to study design. R. J. K. performed the data analyses and drafted the paper and M. D. R. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the paper for submission. The authors report no funding for this research and no conflicts of interest. Data for the project will be made available at the time of publication.

Consent to participate

Consent was given in written format from participants involved in the study.

Consent for publication

Participants consented to publication of the data that were collected when signing their consent forms.

Open practices statement

Data and materials for the project are currently unavailable, but will provided upon publication. Neither experiment was preregistered.