Negative mental factors can lead a person to experience intense distress. For example, aversion can lead to envy and contempt, whereas attachment can lead to dependency.

Villanova University

Negative mental factors are those that distort a person's reality in a way that makes them less calm and more imbalanced.

Negative Mental Factors

Aversion, or hostility, is a mental factor that describes what happens when a person becomes so angry that they perceive everything around them negatively. 

Aversion/Hostility

Attachment, or desire, happens when an individual experiences a selfish desire for an object. The person's reality is altered because they want something so much that they idealize it and fixate on it.

Attachment/Desire

Fabrizio, D. (ed.). (2009). Clinical handbook of mindfulness. Springer. 

Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness

The Impact of Negative Mental Factors on the Individual

For every negative mental factor, there is a corresponding positive mental factor that can dominate it. When a positive mental factor is present in a person's mind, the opposite negative factor cannot occupy their mind.

Relationship Between Positive and Negative Mental Factors

Rumination happens when a person spends a significant amount of time thinking and worrying about a problem. The thought that is ruminated feeds itself continuously, so the person becomes stuck in a constant cycle of worry that eventually distorts their perception of the reality of the situation.

Rumination

There are three basic negative mental factors:

- Illusion/ignorance
- Attachment/desire
- Aversion/hostility

Examples of Negative Mental Factors

one of the most salient correlates of mindfulness practice, it refers to  a subjective quality characterized by an absence of fixation on ideas, images or sensory objects, as well as an absence of internal pressure to obtain, hold, avoid or change circumstances or experiences. It has been proposed as one of the main adaptive action mechanisms in the improvement of well-being linked to mindfulness interventions and has been used as a measure of the detached perspective of the self. It is related to an individuals's amount of meditation practice and is used  to differentiate between clinical populations, healthy people and meditators.  

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