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Flexibility is a personality trait that describes the extent to which a person can cope with changes in circumstances and think about problems and tasks in novel, creative ways. This trait comes into play when stressors or unexpected events occur, requiring that a person change their stance, outlook, or commitment.

Flexibility, or psychological flexibility, as it is sometimes called, is the ability to adapt to situational demands, balance life demands, and commit to behaviors.

Flexible personality should not be confused with cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to switch between two concepts, and to simultaneously think about multiple concepts. Researchers of cognitive flexibility describe it as the ability to switch one's thinking and attention between tasks.

Measures/assessments

Due to the different facets of the definition of psychological flexibility, it is difficult to measure. There are multiple questionnaires that attempt to do so.

Acceptance and Action Questionnaire

The Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ) was designed to measure experiential avoidance. This test found that higher levels of avoidance are linked to higher levels of general psychopathology, depression, anxiety, fears, and a lower quality of life. AAQ also measures avoidant coping and self-deceptive positivity. It was later decided that the AAQ actually measured psychological flexibility, not experiential avoidance. It was used until the AAQ-II was created.

Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II

The AAQ-II was developed in order to improve upon the faults of the AAQ, which included scale brevity, item wording, and item selection procedures that caused insufficient alpha levels to be obtained in measurements. AAQ-II scores predict many outcomes, including mental health and work absence rates. AAQ-II also was more psychometrically consistent than the original AAQ.

Laboratory measures of flexibility are consistent with how flexible people are in their actual lives. The validity of the AAQ has again been brought into question, primarily by inconsistent results. Studies have shown that both versions of the AAQ appear to measure the same thing, which is neuroticism/negative affect rather than experiential avoidance.

Impacts on life

Parent–child relationships

Research shows that parenting psychological flexibility may influence the relationship between parent distress and child distress. When parents are psychologically inflexible they cause more stress in their families.

A similar study looked at the longitudinal relationship between perceived parenting style and psychological flexibility among students over six years (7th–12th grade). Psychological flexibility decreased with age: as children grow older they become more set in their thoughts and habits, being less likely to change them due to circumstances. Results also indicated that authoritarian parenting styles predicted low psychological flexibility in children. Parents who over-control their children tend to restrict how well their children cope with stressors. Also, children with more psychological flexibility in 9th grade were more likely to have decreases in authoritarian and increases in authoritative parenting style later on.

Authoritative parenting styles seem to be associated with psychological flexibility in children. Authoritative parents tend to be more warm, fair, and encouraging than those with other parenting styles, which may be why children raised by this style have more psychological flexibility. Such children are encouraged to be independent and are supported, so they are able to adjust to situations that do not go as predicted.

Work environment

Psychological flexibility improves mental health and absence rates. A mediating variable is job control, which suggests that people have more psychological flexibility when they have more control over their jobs. This is likely due to workers feeling less restricted in what they can do and more empowered to solve problems. A longitudinal study on psychological flexibility and job control showed that these variables predicted workers' mental health, job performance, and even their ability to learn new software. The study demonstrates the power of psychological flexibility in the workplace: psychologically flexible workers have better mental health and job performance. Allowing workers more job control could increase work productivity by increasing the workers' psychological flexibility. In leadership studies, flexibility, defined as "the ability to get along with different groups and adapt to the demands of many organizations," is one aspect of portability, or the ability to acquire skills and move from one company to the next.

Health

The ability to cope and be flexible is positively associated with psychological health. Flexibility reduces depression, anxiety, and stress. An experiment analyzed the relationship between difficulty identifying and describing feelings (DIDF) and psychological flexibility in men undergoing cancer screenings. Results showed that DIDF and psychological flexibility were reliable predictors of mental health. However, psychological flexibility only predicted mental health when DIDF was involved. Psychological flexibility allowed participants to have a better understanding of the subtleties of pleasant and unpleasant emotions. This understanding allowed participants to identify and describe their feelings better, thus enhancing their mental health.

A two-year longitudinal study found that psychological flexibility helps with long-term emotional adjustment. People who are better able to enhance and suppress their expression of emotions are less likely to be stressed over time. People with more psychological flexibility also have greater endurance, higher pain tolerance, and a quicker recovery rate to baseline levels when experiencing physical pain.

How to improve

People can improve their psychological flexibility by training, such as by engaging in various forms of psychotherapy.

Acceptance and commitment therapy

The main goal of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is to increase psychological flexibility. It helps people accept unavoidable events, identify actions that will lead to goals, and acknowledge thoughts rather than accepting or disregarding them. When psychological flexibility was targeted in one study of ACT, there was a stronger reduction in psychological distress. There are six core processes in ACT interventions: acceptance, cognitive defusion, self as context, being present, values, and committed action.

Acceptance

teaches people to embrace their emotions, rather than trying to get rid of them. An example of acceptance would be when people feel angry and then choose to focus on the anger and accept that they are angry, rather than trying to unleash their anger to get rid of it.

Cognitive defusion

teaches people to not take their thoughts as literally true in order to decrease the believability of negative thoughts and increase flexibility to behave as they want. An example of cognitive defusion would be when someone thinks "I am the worst," and then notices the thought for what it is—mere words—perhaps by saying to themselves "I am having the thought that I am the worst". This is in contrast to a cognitive therapy approach where the person might challenge the thought by thinking of things in which he or she excels.

Self-as-context

attempts to have people become aware of their own experiences without being attached to them. This process helps people let go of specific content and experience themselves.

Being present

teaches people to directly experience the world by paying attention to the moment and being aware. An example of being present would be meditation and mindfulness.

Values

teaches people to take actions in deliberate furtherance of qualities they choose. An example is somebody who chooses to continue to improve on being a father (chosen quality) by reliving painful childhood memories about how his own father parented him (action). The purpose is not to encourage pain, but rather to allow people to deal with pain for a valued choice, such as being a good father.

Committed action

teaches people to make changes in behavior in deliberate furtherance of qualities they choose. Committed action involves identifying psychological barriers that will interfere with short, medium, and longer-term goals and then working through those barriers in order to reach the goals.

See also

• Adaptive performance – Adjusting to and understanding change in a workplace
• Emotional regulation – Concept in psychologyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Integrative complexity – Research psychometric
• Openness to experience – Personality trait
• Psychological resilience – Ability to mentally cope with a crisis

References

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4. ^ Hayes, Steven. "Acceptance & Action Questionnaire (AAQ) and AAQ-II". Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
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7. Rochefort, Catherine; Baldwin, Austin S.; Chmielewski, Michael (2017). "Experiential Avoidance: An Examination of the Construct Validity of the AAQ-II and MEAQ". Behavior Therapy. 49 (3): 435–449. doi:10.1016/j.beth.2017.08.008. PMID 29704971.
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16. Feldner, M.T.; Hekmat, H.; Zvolensky, M.J.; Vowles, K.E.; Secrist, Z.; Leen-Feldner, E.W. (2006). "The Role of Experiential Avoidance in Acute Pain Tolerance: A Laboratory Test". Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. 37 (2): 146–158. doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2005.03.002. PMID 15882839.
17. • Greenberg, Leslie S.; Rice, Laura North; Elliott, Robert (1993). Facilitating emotional change: the moment-by-moment process. New York: Guilford Press. p. 76. ISBN 978-0898629941. OCLC 27897484. Once we attend to our emotional feedback, our survival/growth tendency ensures that we are constantly attempting to make the decision most advantageous to our well-being in terms of how we currently perceive ourselves and the situation. Thus the growth tendency is constantly pushing the organism toward adaptive flexibility and need satisfaction in a specific context. As will be noted later, therapy is a process of helping the client access and strengthen this tendency.
    • Kashdan, Todd B.; Rottenberg, Jonathan (November 2010). "Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health". Clinical Psychology Review. 30 (7): 865–878. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001. PMC 2998793. PMID 21151705. We have mentioned empirically based interventions that describe the cultivation of flexibility as a therapeutic aim... However even when psychological interventions do not explicitly discuss flexibility as an aim of treatment (e.g., behavioral activation, cognitive therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy), flexibility is such an integral part of psychological functioning that it is almost inevitable that it will in some way be impacted.
    • Fox, Kieran C.R.; Kang, Yoona; Lifshitz, Michael; Christoff, Kalina (2016). "Increasing cognitive-emotional flexibility with meditation and hypnosis: the cognitive neuroscience of de-automatization". In Raz, Amir; Lifshitz, Michael (eds.). Hypnosis and meditation: towards an integrative science of conscious planes. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 191–220. ISBN 9780198759102. OCLC 948262934. Are there ways in which we can increase the flexibility and diversity of the cognitive and emotional aspects of our spontaneous thought? Practices geared toward changing both the content and process of spontaneous thought are as ancient as their scientific study is new—such techniques have existed for millennia and continue to be developed in modern clinical contexts.
    • Hinton, Devon E.; Kirmayer, Laurence J. (March 2017). "The flexibility hypothesis of healing". Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. 41 (1): 3–34. doi:10.1007/s11013-016-9493-8. PMID 27142641. S2CID 254793002. In this paper, we argue that many forms of healing and psychotherapy may work by inducing positive psychological states marked by flexibility or an enhanced ability to shift cognitive sets.
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20. ^ Boulanger, Jennifer L.; Hayes, Steven C.; Lillis, Jason (2009). "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy". In Fisher, Gary L.; Roget, Nancy A. (eds.). Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, & Recovery. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. pp. 4–7. ISBN 9781412950848.

• Personality
• Psychological adjustment