New analysis says mindfulness and authenticity may be one trait

A New Zealand sample of 301 people may have put two of psychology’s favorite self-improvement ideas into the same bucket. In a new analysis, Anja Roemer, Anna Sutton and Oleg N. Medvedev tested whether mindfulness and authenticity could sit on one latent trait, and the answer suggested that, once a few nonessential items were removed, the overlap was hard to ignore.

The paper, Authenticity and mindfulness: Related or part of the same construct?, appeared in Personality and Individual Differences and used unidimensional Rasch analysis on two familiar measures: the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Integrated Authenticity Scale. That matters because mindfulness is usually treated as a set of related facets, not a single thing, while authenticity has long been framed as a separate idea tied to alignment between action and deeper identity. The new model pushed against that split.

The conceptual overlap is easy to see in daily life. If criticism lands hard, mindfulness helps a person notice the sting without instant reactivity. Authenticity adds a second step: responding without betraying a sense of self. The paper’s deeper claim is that those may not be two separate skills at all, but different expressions of the same capacity for awareness. In Buddhist practice, mindfulness is often described as attention to present-moment experience without judgment. In existential and humanistic traditions, authenticity means living in line with who you really are. Here, those traditions met in the same questionnaire data.

The new analysis did not arrive in a vacuum. In 2021, Sutton and Medvedev reported that authenticity and mindfulness together explained 29 percent of the variance in depression in an employed New Zealand sample of 301 people, and that mindfulness buffered the negative impact of low authenticity on depression. An earlier 2020 paper by Sutton and colleagues went in a similar direction, using principal component analysis on eight subscales from the Authenticity Scale and the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. That study found a two-component model centered on internal and external authentic awareness.

For mindfulness teachers, coaches and researchers, the practical stakes are clear. If awareness and self-congruence are measuring nearly the same psychological territory, then an exercise meant to build calm may also be training people to feel more like themselves. For someone on the cushion, that could mean noticing not just the breath, but the parts of experience that feel forced, performative or off-center. For someone journaling before a hard decision, the question may shift from “How do I stay calm?” to “What response lets me stay present and stay true?” The research does not erase the distinction between mindfulness and authenticity, but it does suggest that in real life, the two may rise and fall together.