In plain language
Buddhist psychology has held for more than two thousand years that suffering does not come from our circumstances but from how tightly we grip them. Attachment, in this sense, means clinging to a distorted picture of things — exaggerating what we like about what we want, screening out what we do not like — and then suffering when reality inevitably fails to match. Nonattachment is the proposed antidote: a flexible, balanced way of relating to experience, without clinging to the pleasant or suppressing the unpleasant. Crucially, it is not detachment, aloofness, or indifference. Nonattached people stay fully engaged; they just do not need experience to go a particular way.
This encyclopedia entry describes the measure that turned that idea into science. The Nonattachment Scale (NAS) is a 30-item, single-factor self-report questionnaire. Its development was unusually careful about staying faithful to the tradition it came from: Sahdra, Shaver, and Brown (2010) first consulted 18 Buddhist experts across the Theravadan, Zen, and Indo-Tibetan traditions to build a conception of nonattachment that no single tradition owned. Those experts described it in terms of psychological flexibility, nonreactivity, well-being that is not contingent on circumstances, openness to the undesirable facts of life, and genuine engagement with the present.
From that conception, 135 candidate items were written, then rated by nine Buddhist experts averaging 18 years of monastic or teacher-led training. Seventy-five items survived. Factor analysis in 331 US college students narrowed these to 32; a second analysis in a nationally representative American sample (N = 511) produced the final 30 items, and an independent sample confirmed the single-factor structure. The entry then reviews what a decade and a half of subsequent research has found, describes the Spanish and Chinese translations and the two short forms, and is candid about where the scale falls short.
Key points
- Reliable across studies. Internal consistency ranges from α = .87 to .94 across diverse samples, with robust test-retest reliability and known-groups validity (it separates meditators from non-meditators).
- Converges where it should. Nonattachment correlates positively with mindfulness, self-compassion, acceptance, and autonomous motivation, and negatively with anxious attachment and materialism.
- Linked to well-being. Higher scores predict greater subjective and eudaimonic well-being, a personality profile characteristic of well-being (higher extraversion, lower neuroticism), and less depression, anxiety, stress, and difficulty regulating emotion — replicated by independent research teams.
- Linked to how we treat others. Nonattachment relates to perspective-taking, empathy, and generosity, and in adolescents to peer-rated kindness and helpfulness.
- Translated and validated. The Chinese NAS (Chao & Chen, 2013; 313 Taiwanese soldiers, α = .92) is distinguishable from the Chinese construct of Zhong-Yong thinking. The Spanish NAS (Feliu-Soler et al., 2016; 625 adults, α = .95) shows a one-factor solution and discriminates meditators, non-meditators, and people with bipolar disorder.
- Two short forms. The 8-item NAS-SF (Chio, Lai, & Mak, 2018) was built with item response theory; the 7-item NAS-7 (Elphinstone, Sahdra, & Ciarrochi, 2020) with stricter item-selection criteria. They correlate r = .82 with each other and r = .90–.93 with the full NAS, with α ≈ .84 across American and Australian samples.
- The NAS-7 is the only nonattachment measure validated longitudinally. Ciarrochi, Sahdra, Yap, and Dicke (2020) demonstrated measurement invariance over time and predictive validity for mental health improvements in adolescents — making it the version of choice for tracking developmental change.
Where the scale falls short
- Some original items assess more than one concept or contain compound elements (for example, "calm and/or happy"), inviting inconsistent interpretation — the concern that drove the stricter item selection used for the NAS-7.
- The NAS-30 mixes positively and negatively worded items, which has been associated with method effects; the Spanish validation had to model correlated error terms for the negatively worded items.
- Validation has been concentrated in Western samples (United States, Australia), with cross-cultural work so far limited to Spanish and Chinese.
- A Rasch analysis (Feng et al., 2016) proposed a 26-item revision with superior discriminatory power, but it has not been widely adopted, and the field lacks consensus on whether the 30-item, 26-item, or short forms are optimal.
- Most validation has used college student and general community samples; performance in clinical populations and hard-to-reach groups still needs establishing.
How to cite
APA
Sahdra, B. K., & Ciarrochi, J. (2026). Nonattachment Scale. In N. N. Singh (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Mindfulness, Buddhism, and Other Contemplative Practices. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90465-4_175-1
BibTeX
@incollection{sahdra2026nonattachmentscale,
title = {Nonattachment Scale},
author = {Sahdra, Baljinder K. and Ciarrochi, Joseph},
editor = {Singh, Nirbhay N.},
booktitle = {Encyclopedia of Mindfulness, Buddhism, and Other Contemplative Practices},
publisher = {Springer},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-90465-4_175-1}
}
Related work
- The Nonattachment Scale: versions, scoring, and free downloads (non-attachment.com)
- Nonattachment and mindfulness: related but distinct constructs (Sahdra, Ciarrochi, & Parker, 2016, Psychological Assessment)
- The role of nonattachment in the development of adolescent mental health (Ciarrochi, Sahdra, Yap, & Dicke, 2020, Mindfulness)
- Empathy and nonattachment independently predict peer nominations of prosocial behaviour (Sahdra et al., 2015, Frontiers in Psychology)
- From experiential attachment to nonattachment: a theory-informed review (Ciarrochi et al., 2025)
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.