Center for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognitive Behavioral Intervention

The Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale (MAAS) is a self-report measure of mindfulness at a trait-level, developed to assess individual differences in the dispositional quality of mindfulness, in particular, attention and awareness in daily life present moment experience of individuals without meditation experience. This 15-item instrument addresses cognitive, emotional, physical, interpersonal and general domains, with no reverse scores and a single total score where higher scores reflect greater mindfulness.Mindfulness is indirectly assessed, and individuals are asked to rate the items by answering how mindlessly they do things and behave in their daily life (in opposition to being mindful of the present moment). This scale has been validated with college and community samples, both in its original and Portuguese versions. In the adaption of MAAS to the Portuguese population, two confirmatory factor analyses yielded a single-factor solution attesting for the goodness of fit of a model with 14 items of this scale. There is enough evidence to believe that the best solution is the 14-item version, more research is recommended. Cross-validation statistics showed that the single-factor structure is valid for different respondents from the general population, and MAAS was also found to have good convergent and divergent validities.