Overstating the effect of mindfulness on motivated perception: Comment on Adair and Fredrickson (2015)

• Adair and Fredrickson (2015) claimed that mindfulness predicted reduced motivated perception.
• This claim was overstated and depended on
• an unjustified method of assessing the “noticed ambiguity” of the visual image,
• the inappropriate use of one-tailed p-values.
• The inclusion of an untheorized predictor that resulted in statistical suppression.

A recent article by Adair and Fredrickson (2015) concluded that both trait mindfulness and state mindfulness significantly predicted reduced motivated perception, and that these predictions were “strengthened” when participants who noticed the ambiguity of an image were excluded from the analyses and when mood was controlled. A comparison of the article with Adair's (2013) master's thesis, on which the article was based, reveals that Adair and Fredrickson (2015) have overstated their findings by (a) selecting without justification one of the two available methods of determining whether the ambiguity of the image was noticed, (b) inappropriately using one-tailed p-values, and (c) including in the analyses without theoretical justification a new predictor—mood—that resulted in a statistical suppression situation.