Ruth A. Baer

Introduction

Ruth A. Baer is an American clinical psychologist whose measurement work made mindfulness a researchable quantity. Her 2006 paper introducing the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) gave a field that had, until then, relied on a scatter of incompatible scales a single common instrument; it has since become the most widely used self-report measure of dispositional mindfulness and has been translated into numerous languages. Baer spent 33 years at the University of Kentucky, where she is now Emeritus Professor, and since 2019 has taught and trained mindfulness-based cognitive therapy teachers at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre. Her research spans the assessment of mindfulness, mindfulness-based interventions, and the mechanisms through which mindfulness training is supposed to work.

Early Life and Education

Baer's route into psychology was not the conventional one. She took her B.A. in 1980 at the University of Kansas — in music, not psychology — before moving into clinical training at West Virginia University, where she completed an M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1985. Her clinical internship was served at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the associated Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a licensed psychologist in Kentucky.

Her turn toward contemplative practice came from clinical work rather than from personal interest. She has described coming to mindfulness in 1997 through professional involvement in dialectical behavior therapy, a treatment that includes mindfulness skills as a core module; that exposure led her to study the practices more deeply. She subsequently completed formal training in dialectical behavior therapy (1997), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction (both 2002), acceptance and commitment therapy, and mindfulness-based relapse prevention (2011), and has maintained a personal meditation practice since 1997.

Academic and Professional Career

Baer joined the University of Kentucky in 1985 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and to professor in 2006, and served as associate director (1991–1996) and director (1996–2001) of clinical training. Her early research was in clinical assessment and cognitive-behavioral therapy; the mindfulness work began in earnest in the early 2000s, at the point when "third wave" behavioural therapies were moving into the mainstream.

The programme she built at Kentucky had three strands: developing and validating instruments; applying mindfulness-based interventions to clinical populations, including people with borderline personality disorder and borderline traits; and investigating mechanisms of change — what, exactly, mindfulness training alters that produces symptomatic improvement. She also worked on mindfulness and impulsivity, anger rumination, shame and rejection sensitivity.

After retiring from Kentucky, Baer moved to Oxford in 2019 to work with the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, where she teaches MBCT for Life and Finding Peace in a Frantic World, trains MBCT teachers internationally, and tutors on Oxford's Master of Studies in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Her declared research interests have shifted toward professional training and ethics in the mindfulness field and toward the prevention of harm and adverse events in mindfulness-based programmes — an agenda that implicitly concedes some of the field's most serious criticisms.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills

Baer's first major instrument, published with Gregory Smith and Kristin Allen in Assessment in 2004, was the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS). It treated mindfulness not as a single state but as a set of learnable skills — observing, describing, acting with awareness and accepting without judgment — an operationalisation designed for use in therapies such as MBSR, MBCT, DBT and ACT.

The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire

The FFMQ, reported in Assessment in 2006 with Smith, Jennifer Hopkins, Jacqueline Krietemeyer and Leslie Toney, pooled 112 items from five existing mindfulness scales — the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale, the Mindfulness Questionnaire and the KIMS — and subjected them to exploratory factor analysis in 613 undergraduate students. Thirty-nine items survived, loading on five facets: observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging of inner experience, and non-reactivity to inner experience. Subscale reliabilities ranged from .75 to .91. In a 2008 follow-up she and colleagues reported that a five-factor hierarchical structure fitted meditating and non-meditating samples, and that the facets could be combined into a global score.

The instrument's importance is difficult to overstate: for two decades, "mindfulness" in most published research has meant scores on Baer's questionnaire or one of its translations and short forms.

Mindfulness in clinical contexts

Baer's 2003 review in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice was among the first rigorous assessments of mindfulness training as a clinical intervention, and her edited volumes — Mindfulness-Based Treatment Approaches (2006; 2nd ed. 2014) and Assessing Mindfulness and Acceptance Processes in Clients (2010) — became standard clinician references. With Laurie Greco and Gregory Smith she developed the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM) in 2011, extending assessment downward in age.

Mindfulness and psychopathology

A strand of her work examines how mindfulness facets relate to impulsivity, self-harm, anger rumination and borderline personality features, using the five-facet structure to ask which components of mindfulness do the clinical work rather than treating mindfulness as an undifferentiated good.

Major Publications

Baer, R. A. (2003). Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10, 125–143.
Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., & Allen, K. B. (2004). Assessment of mindfulness by self-report: The Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills. Assessment, 11, 191–206.
Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Hopkins, J., Krietemeyer, J., & Toney, L. (2006). Using self-report assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness. Assessment, 13, 27–45.
Baer, R. A. (Ed.) (2006). Mindfulness-Based Treatment Approaches: Clinician's Guide to Evidence Base and Applications. Elsevier. (2nd ed., 2014.)
Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Lykins, E., Button, D., Krietemeyer, J., Sauer, S., Walsh, E., Duggan, D., & Williams, J. M. G. (2008). Construct validity of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire in meditating and nonmeditating samples. Assessment, 15, 329–342.
Baer, R. A. (Ed.) (2010). Assessing Mindfulness and Acceptance Processes in Clients: Illuminating the Theory and Practice of Change. New Harbinger.
Greco, L., Baer, R. A., & Smith, G. T. (2011). Assessing mindfulness in children and adolescents: Development and validation of the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM). Psychological Assessment, 23, 606–614.
Baer, R. A. (2014). The Practicing Happiness Workbook. New Harbinger. (UK edition as Practising Happiness.)

Impact and Legacy

Baer's instruments did for mindfulness what the Beck Depression Inventory did for depression research: they made a construct countable, and the count made the intervention legible to funders, insurers and trial designers. The FFMQ is used to evaluate mindfulness-based therapy worldwide, has been modelled computationally as a network of interlocking skills, and underpins a large share of the published evidence for mindfulness-based programmes.

The criticisms of her work are largely criticisms of self-report mindfulness measurement in general, but they land on her instruments because hers are the ones everyone uses. Wording artefacts. Nicholas Van Dam and colleagues argued in 2012, in a paper pointedly titled "Mind Your Words," that the mixture of positively and negatively worded items in mindfulness scales introduces a method effect — variance attributable to item direction rather than to the construct. Because distressed and non-distressed respondents may respond to reverse-worded items differently, part of what the FFMQ measures could be response style.

Construct validity for non-meditators. Paul Grossman, in a series of papers beginning in 2008, argued that self-report mindfulness items are systematically ambiguous to people without meditation experience: a novice asked whether she "notices" or "does not judge" her experience may interpret the question in ways that have little to do with the Buddhist-derived concept of sati the items were written to capture. If so, comparing meditators' and non-meditators' scores is comparing different things.

Factor instability. The five-factor structure is not robust across samples. Baer herself reported that a four-factor hierarchical model provided the optimal fit for student, community and highly educated adult samples, with the observing facet loading separately; five factors emerged only in the meditating sample. In non-meditators the observing facet correlates weakly with the other four and is sometimes positively associated with distress — a pattern that undermines the idea of a unitary mindfulness trait and complicates the use of a global score.

What the scale actually measures. Because facets such as non-judging and acting with awareness correlate strongly and negatively with neuroticism and general psychological distress, critics argue the FFMQ may partly be a measure of the absence of psychopathology rather than the presence of a distinct skill. Observed pre-to-post increases in mindfulness scores during an intervention may therefore reflect symptom reduction measured from a different angle, which weakens claims that mindfulness is the mechanism of change.

Independence. Twenty-four of the FFMQ's thirty-nine items come from Baer's own earlier KIMS, and four of its five facets correspond to the KIMS facets. The FFMQ is thus in part a re-analysis of a previously published instrument, which some methodologists regard as limiting how much independent confirmation its structure provides.

Context. The wider "McMindfulness" critique — that Buddhist practice was extracted from its ethical and communal frame and repackaged as an individual performance technology — sits behind these technical objections. Baer's own recent turn toward teacher training, ethics and the prevention of adverse events in mindfulness-based programmes reads as a partial acceptance that the field moved faster than its evidence and its safeguards.

Learn More

Steven C. Hayes — founder of acceptance and commitment therapy, one of the traditions Baer's instruments were built for
Aaron Beck — cognitive therapy, against which third-wave mindfulness approaches defined themselves
Barbara Fredrickson — positive emotion research that intersects with mindfulness and well-being

References

Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Hopkins, J., Krietemeyer, J., & Toney, L. (2006). Using self-report assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness. Assessment, 13(1), 27-45.