The Nonattachment Scale (NAS)

What the NAS measures

Nonattachment is a flexible, balanced way of relating to one's experiences without clinging to them or suppressing them. A nonattached person can enjoy pleasant experiences without needing them to last forever, and can face difficult experiences without being ruled by them. Importantly, nonattachment is not detachment or indifference — nonattached people remain fully engaged with their thoughts, feelings, and relationships, just without rigid clinging.

The Nonattachment Scale, created by Sahdra, Shaver, and Brown (2010), turned this concept — rooted in more than two thousand years of Buddhist psychology — into a validated empirical measure. Candidate items were reviewed by nine experts from three major Buddhist traditions; the 30 items that survived rigorous psychometric reduction form the NAS-30. The scale shows strong reliability and good criterion and discriminant validity, and higher scores consistently predict greater well-being, life satisfaction, and prosocial behavior, and lower depression, anxiety, and stress.

Versions of the scale

• NAS-30 — the original 30-item unidimensional scale (Sahdra, Shaver, & Brown, 2010). Best when nonattachment is a central focus of the study. Validated translations exist in Spanish and Chinese.
• NAS-7 — a 7-item short form (Elphinstone, Sahdra, & Ciarrochi, 2020), ideal for large surveys and longitudinal studies where questionnaire space is limited. It 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. A 7-item version was first used in Sahdra, Ciarrochi, Parker, Marshall, and Heaven (2015).
• NAS-SF — an 8-item short form developed using item response theory, selecting items by their contribution to test information (Chio, Lai, & Mak, 2018).

The two short forms correlate highly with each other (r = .82) and with the full NAS (r = .90–.93), show strong reliability (α ≈ .84) across American and Australian samples, and produce comparable associations with life satisfaction, depression, and materialism. A Rasch analysis by Feng et al. (2016) proposed a revised 26-item version with superior discriminatory power, but it has not been widely adopted.

How the scale was developed

The NAS was built through a rigorous, culturally informed process. Sahdra, Shaver, and Brown (2010) first consulted 18 Buddhist experts from three major traditions — Theravadan, Zen, and Indo-Tibetan — to arrive at a conceptualisation of nonattachment that transcended tradition-specific interpretations. These experts described nonattachment as manifesting through psychological flexibility, nonreactivity, noncontingent well-being, openness to undesirable facts of life, and genuine engagement with present experience — traits fundamentally distinct from detachment, aloofness, or indifference.

An initial pool of 135 items was generated, then rated by nine Buddhist experts with extensive training (averaging 18 years of monastic or teacher-led training and meditation practice). Seventy-five items rated consistently highly across traditions went forward to psychometric analysis. Exploratory factor analysis in 331 US college students identified 32 items loading above .40 on a single factor; a second analysis in a nationally representative American sample (N = 511) refined the scale to 30 items accounting for 35.24% of variance with excellent internal consistency (α = .94). Confirmatory factor analysis in an independent validation sample confirmed the unidimensional structure with excellent fit.

What the evidence shows

Across multiple independent studies the NAS has shown excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha ranging from .87 to .94 in diverse samples, along with robust test-retest reliability and known-groups validity (distinguishing meditators from non-meditators).

• Convergent validity — positive associations with mindfulness, self-compassion, acceptance, and autonomous motivation; negative associations with anxious attachment and materialism.
• Well-being — higher nonattachment predicts greater subjective and eudaimonic well-being and a personality profile characteristic of well-being (higher extraversion, lower neuroticism).
• Reduced distress — lower depression, anxiety, stress, and difficulties in emotion regulation, replicated independently by multiple research teams.
• Interpersonal benefits — positive links with perspective-taking, empathy, generosity, and, in adolescent samples, peer-rated kindness and helpfulness.

Translations

• Chinese — Chao and Chen (2013) validated the Chinese NAS in 313 military soldiers in Taiwan (α = .92), showing that nonattachment is related to but distinguishable from the Chinese construct of Zhong-Yong thinking. Scores correlated positively with subjective well-being and self-determination, and negatively with state-trait anxiety and perceived stress.
• Spanish — Feliu-Soler et al. (2016) validated the Spanish NAS in 625 adults, with a one-factor solution accounting for 42% of variance and excellent internal consistency (α = .95). It showed expected correlations with mindfulness, decentering, resilience, emotion regulation difficulties, and psychopathology, and discriminated between meditators, non-meditators, and people with bipolar disorder. The NAS-7 has also been validated in Spanish-speaking samples.

The NAS-7 items

Respondents rate each statement from 1 (Disagree Strongly) to 6 (Agree Strongly), answering according to what really reflects their experience:

Scoring

All NAS versions are scored by averaging the item ratings, with higher scores indicating greater nonattachment. The seven NAS-7 items above are all positively worded, so no reverse scoring is needed. The original 30-item NAS contains both positively and negatively worded items — reverse-score the negatively worded items before averaging. There are no clinical cutoffs; the scale is designed for research and for tracking change over time.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths. Development was grounded in consultation with experts from three major Buddhist traditions, giving the scale conceptual validity and cross-tradition applicability. It has excellent psychometric properties across independent studies, works across diverse populations and languages, and is available in validated short forms that reduce participant burden while preserving measurement quality. The NAS-7's demonstrated measurement invariance over time makes it well suited to tracking developmental change.

Limitations. Some original items assess more than one concept or contain compound elements (for example, "calm and/or happy"), which can be interpreted inconsistently by respondents — a concern that motivated the stricter item selection used for the NAS-7. The mix of positively and negatively worded items in the NAS-30 has been associated with method effects; the Spanish validation addressed this by modelling correlated error terms for the negatively worded items. Validation has occurred mainly in Western samples (United States, Australia), with cross-cultural work so far limited to Spanish and Chinese. The field also lacks consensus on whether the 30-item, the Rasch-revised 26-item, or the short forms are optimal, and more work is needed in clinical populations and hard-to-reach groups.

How to cite

Key research using the NAS

• Nonattachment protects adolescent mental health — a 3-year longitudinal study (Ciarrochi, Sahdra, Yap, & Dicke, 2020, Mindfulness)
• Nonattachment and mindfulness: related but distinct constructs (Sahdra, Ciarrochi, & Parker, 2016, Psychological Assessment)
• From experiential attachment to nonattachment: a theory-informed review (Ciarrochi et al., 2025, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science)
• Empathy and nonattachment independently predict prosocial behavior (Sahdra et al., 2015, Frontiers in Psychology)

References cited on this page

• Chao, S.-H., & Chen, P.-H. (2013). The reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the Nonattachment Scale. Bulletin of Educational Psychology, 45(1), 121–139.
• Chio, F. H. N., Lai, M. H. C., & Mak, W. W. S. (2018). Development of the Nonattachment Scale-Short Form (NAS-SF) using item response theory. Mindfulness, 9(4), 1299–1308. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0874-z
• Ciarrochi, J., Sahdra, B. K., Yap, K., & Dicke, T. (2020). The role of nonattachment in the development of adolescent mental health: A three-year longitudinal study. Mindfulness, 11(9), 2131–2139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01421-7
• Devine, E. K., Elphinstone, B., Ciarrochi, J., & Sahdra, B. K. (2025). Nonattachment Scale (NAS). In O. N. Medvedev, C. U. Krägeloh, R. J. Siegert, & N. N. Singh (Eds.), Handbook of assessment in mindfulness research (pp. 1043–1066). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47219-0_38
• Elphinstone, B., Sahdra, B. K., & Ciarrochi, J. (2020). Living well by letting go: Reliability and validity of a brief measure of nonattachment. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ew4ns
• Feliu-Soler, A., Soler, J., Luciano, J. V., Cebolla, A., Elices, M., Demarzo, M., & García-Campayo, J. (2016). Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Nonattachment Scale (NAS). Mindfulness, 7(5), 1156–1169. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-016-0558-0
• Feng, X. J., Krägeloh, C. U., Medvedev, O. N., Billington, D. R., Jang, J. Y., & Siegert, R. J. (2016). Assessing mechanisms of mindfulness: Improving the precision of the Nonattachment Scale using a Rasch model. Mindfulness, 7(5), 1082–1091. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-016-0546-4
• Sahdra, B. K., Shaver, P. R., & Brown, K. W. (2010). A scale to measure nonattachment: A Buddhist complement to Western research on attachment and adaptive functioning. Journal of Personality Assessment, 92(2), 116–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890903425960

Learn more

For an accessible introduction to nonattachment — what it is, what it isn't, and practices for developing it — see the non-attachment.com home page. For the full body of research, see Joseph Ciarrochi's publications (380+, many with free PDFs).