Freedom from Fusion (FFF)
Freedom from Fusion assesses how people hold their thoughts, feelings and self-concepts: whether these dictate their responses or can be held more lightly.
Integrated Self-Transcendence (IST)
A text-based measure of contemplative freedom in everyday life
Enquire about using ISTExplore the evidence
Free IST scoring for COFO-funded research, up to 100 participants per team per request. Eligibility and pricing.
IST assesses freedom from fusion and concern preservation in participants’ own writing. Here, we take integration to mean the consolidation of the capacity for freedom from fusion (with thoughts, feelings and one’s sense of self) into habitual meaning-making, as opposed to its temporary availability during a state experience. Freedom from Fusion (FFF) builds on ego development theory (EDT), drawing on Loevinger and Cook-Greuter’s use of language to study how people make sense of themselves and their world. The dimensions assessed by FFF were derived from tens of thousands of expert-scored sentence completions (Madl & Cook-Greuter, 2026). That ego development scoring model exceeded the agreement benchmark used for human scorer certification.
Concern Preservation (CP)
Concern Preservation asks whether a particular concern, such as a challenge another person is facing, is still taken to matter in how the writer understands or responds to the situation (as opposed to excluded or bypassed).
The two results are reported separately. See a scored response →
FFF is currently being used alongside fMRI in meditation research at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Why use IST?
Draw on an established method for studying meaning-making
Sentence completion is a well-established semi-projective technique. Participants complete sentence stems about relationships, work, emotions and self in their own words, giving several examples of how they make meaning of their experience.
Research behind sentence completion
In the Loevinger/Cook-Greuter tradition, decades of research show that this captures more than verbal intelligence, and that trying to sound more mature has limited success in raising scores. Because the stems span many situations, researchers can examine whether a way of understanding experience appears across them.
The ego-development scoring system from which FFF’s dimensions originated matched expert stage judgments in 86.1% of 851 assessments under cross-validation, with 85.1% agreement in an independent blinded replication of 47 assessments. Both meet the approximately 85% agreement benchmark used for human scorer certification. Madl & Cook-Greuter, 2026.
Assess experience without asking participants to rate their own mindfulness
People can use different standards when rating themselves, and those standards (and introspective capacity) can change with practice. Participants completing IST describe their experiences in their own words. They do not have to decide how mindful or advanced they are. The same scoring criteria are applied across participants and occasions.
Everyday-language rewrites
In our tests, rewriting responses in everyday language left scores nearly unchanged.
Differences between groups
Freedom from Fusion distinguished long-term meditators from controls by more than two standard deviations (g = 2.26). The ten-stem form retained almost all of that separation (g = 2.03).
Relationship with self-reported mindfulness
FFF correlated with self-reported mindfulness (r = .37), compared with .09 for expert-rated developmental stage.
Development over time
In the aging study, older adults who reported practising showed a 0.50-point [0.29, 0.71] greater increase in Freedom from Fusion over two years, after accounting for baseline score, age and assigned study group.
Freedom alongside engagement
The capacity to hold things lightly is not the same as not caring. In workplace reflections, accounts that kept another person's challenge in view received higher human ratings of perspective consideration than accounts that excluded the concern, beyond what Freedom from Fusion and response length explained.
FAQ
How does IST complement questionnaires?
Questionnaires ask participants to rate their own experience. The standards people use can differ between groups and change with practice. IST applies fixed scoring criteria to their written accounts. The two approaches can be used together to examine different aspects of contemplative development.
How does IST compare with general-purpose chat models?
Given the same rubric and texts, ChatGPT Instant and Claude Sonnet 5.5 showed high agreement with expert reference judgments, as did the fine-tuned scorers. For the same accounts, they gave roughly five to seven times as much extra credit for spiritual rather than neutral quotations as the FFF scorer. The comparison.
Scoring runs on OFAI-operated servers in Vienna; participant text is not sent to commercial AI providers. Studies can retain the same scoring version throughout. Data handling →
How does spiritual vocabulary affect scores?
Spiritual vocabulary did not explain the meditator–control difference. Removing the 31 of 1,571 responses with explicit spiritual or mindfulness words left the separation unchanged (g = 2.22 versus 2.26). Details.
Do the findings simply reflect longer answers or greater verbal ability?
Meditators scored higher than controls even after accounting for response length and verbal ability. The corresponding difference in expert-rated developmental stage was no longer statistically significant. See comparison.
How does FFF relate to ego development?
The two are related (r = .79 with expert-rated stage). But in the same people, Freedom from Fusion separated meditators from controls more strongly (g = 2.26 versus 1.48) and related more strongly to self-reported mindfulness (r = .37 versus .09). FFF still distinguished meditators from controls after accounting for expert-rated developmental stage. Details.
Can I use it on data I already have?
Yes. Journals, retreat reflections and interview excerpts can be scored. Keep complete accounts and the questions that elicited them. Roughly 50–100 participant-written words per account is a practical target, without trimming or padding. Using existing writing.
What does scoring cost?
IST scoring is free for institutionally affiliated, noncommercial COFO-funded research teams, for up to 100 participants per team per request. Ego-development stage scoring is a separate paid service. Pricing and eligibility →
Hedges’ g expresses a group difference in standard deviations. Brackets give 95% confidence intervals.
Choose a form for your study
Already have journals, reflections or interviews? Use existing writing. Scoring uses research-controlled servers in Vienna; participant texts are deleted after delivery.