## 4 Meditation, Implicit Attitudes, and Implicit Memory  
We have briefly presented the TCI, an instrument that allows one to catch explicit self-concepts and attitudes about personality. Nevertheless, research and theory recognize two types of attitude: explicit and implicit. Explicit attitudes rely on propositional processes, and are shaped by well-articulated beliefs and motivations; implicit attitudes rely on automatic and associative processes, and are shaped by intuitive feelings and evaluations, that one could or could not be aware of [25]. From a methodological point of view, if explicit attitudes are measured directly with self-report questionnaires and scales, implicit attitudes are assessed indirectly with performance-based procedures, such as the popular Implicit Association Test (IAT) [26], which do not require self-reflection and avoid the direct influence of self-evaluation. In particular, the IAT is a computer test that requires participants to associate as fast as possible two target concepts to an attribute. The idea underlying this measure is that the more a concept and an attitude are implicitly associated in memory, the easier and faster participants associate them in the computer task (see Figure 1 for an example of stimulus sequence in a typical IAT experiment). It has been shown that explicit and implicit attitudes are not always coherent; moreover, incongruities between explicit an implicit self-representations are often related to several forms of psychological suffering [29; 30]; concordance between explicit and implicit self-attitudes seem to be important for psychological well-being. In this perspective, studies have investigated which factors can contribute in some way to create a more coherent self-image, promoting a concordance between implicit and explicit representations; mindfulness has been seen as a useful construct in this direction. While most of the research concerning the psychological effects of mindfulness meditation has assessed people's self-attitudes at an explicit level, few researchers have tried to understand if and how dispositional mindfulness (individuals' propensity for mindfulness) and/or meditative practice can affect implicit constructs, employing indirect measures to assess changes in implicit attitudes, prejudice, and stereotypes [31], but also addressing implicit self-esteem and self-concepts (see [32]). Some studies focused on the effects of meditation (and also dispositional mindfulness) on explicit and implicit attitudes, highlighting how mindfulness is correlated to an improved concordance between these two levels (see Table 1). Figure 1: The schematic structure of a self-esteem IAT is reported. The IAT typically consists of seven blocks of trials (each block typically includes from 20 to 60 trials; blocks 1, 2, and 5 are familiarization blocks,while blocks 3 and 4 and blocks 6 and 7 are the congruent and incongruent blocks, respectively) in which a series of stimulus words appear at the center of the computer screen one at a time and must be associated to the stimulus categories (good, bad, self, other) shown on the upper left or right corner of the screen by pressing two corresponding response keys (e.g., in the first block good and bad words are presented one at a time, e.g., the bad stimulus word ‘ugly’ in the example, and have to be classified as being either good (left key) or bad (right key); the right key response is the correct response in the example). The IAT measures the strength of automatic concept-attribute associations. In the example of a self-esteem IAT this occurs between two groups of target words concerning the concepts of self vs. other and words related to good vs. bad dimensions (i.e., positive vs. negative valence words, respectively). The association is tested in both congruent (self + good; other + bad) and incongruent (self + bad; other + good) conditions.