Two risk factors for anxiety and depression in adolescence were examined: co-rumination, which occurs when friends excessively talk about problems; and psychological inflexibility, which occurs when one avoids negative feelings and fails to act on values. I hypothesized that psychological inflexibility would exacerbate the effect of co-rumination on adolescent anxiety and depression. Participants were 167 adolescents (Mage = 14.60 years, SD = 1.3; 65.7% cisgender males) who completed standard measures as part of an online survey. Results indicated no moderation effect, but there were main effects of co-rumination and psychological inflexibility on depression symptoms. Co-rumination may relate to higher depression symptoms by reinforcing a focus on stressors. Adolescents exhibiting psychological inflexibility may exacerbate symptoms by avoiding growth opportunities and perseverating on negative emotions. Results call for more research on co-rumination and psychological inflexibility as well as clinical interventions. Limitations include using cross-sectional, self-report methodology.

The objective of this paper is to provide a foundation for understanding the management of inflexibility in an integrated process by using sales compensation process as a studied case. The majority of process integration studies have focused on the design and management of an efficient operation by taking the advantage of information technology. Little was known about the downsides of process integration. It is necessary to build deep knowledge about the management of integration inflexibility so that risks of integration failure can be minimized. By summarizing literature and industry experiences of process integration and enterprise flexibility and inflexibility, three types of inflexibility are proposed. They are operational, organizational, and system inflexibilities. The sources of these inflexibilities can be categorized into two types: nature of IT-enabled integrating and technological barriers. These two sources of inflexibility, observed in the studied case, are interrelated and can correlatively affect business performance. Companies that intend to apply process integration to their sales compensation process would aim for eliminating the risk of integration downsides by examining the sources of inflexibilities in the IT-enabled process. Only with a solid and thorough view of the system, could companies achieve their goals of rolling out the packaged service in the compensation plan process. This paper analyses the up and down sides of process integration and plans to provide guidance for further application of process integration packages.

Mental and emotional health concerns among college students are prevalent and diverse in their symptom presentations. With increasing demands on counseling centers to provide efficient care and to address students with higher acuity or risk for harm, there has been an increased focus on identifying therapeutic targets that underlie a wide breadth of concerns to broaden the scope and impact of mental health services. Psychological inflexibility is one such target and refers to a combination of excessive avoidance of internal experiences coupled with a lack of actions that align with a person’s values. Interventions for psychological inflexibility aim to support people in reducing actions that are mostly about avoiding unwanted thoughts and feelings and actions that involve moving towards chosen values. Such interventions may produce changes in people’s actions in part through helping people notice and label the different roles their actions play in relation to thoughts, feelings, and personal values. However, the skill of noticing and labeling the purposes of one’s actions has not been studied in interventions for psychological inflexibility despite being discussed in theoretical writings. Training this skill may serve as a direct means of reducing psychological inflexibility and as a foundation for other interventions, thus it may be a relevant target in interventions for psychological inflexibility among college students. Given this, the present study developed and tested an intervention focused on noticing and labeling one’s actions as an intervention for psychological inflexibility in a college student sample, as delivered through web and app-based media. The study recruited 106 students with symptoms of depression and anxiety from a medium sized university in the Mountain West of the United States, and then randomly assigned them to either wait for eight weeks or receive a three-week online and app-based training for noticing and labeling avoidant and values-consistent actions. The results of the study indicated short-term effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety for participants who received the online and app-based training as compared with participants who were asked to wait, although both groups showed reductions in symptoms by the end of the study period. Participants did not report changes in the target skill of noticing and labeling their actions although the study did find larger reductions in psychological inflexibility among participants who received the training as compared with those asked to wait. Further, changes in psychological flexibility were related to changes in behavioral activity and life satisfaction, but not life quality. The results raise questions about the necessity of training the ability to notice and label one’s actions as a direct intervention mechanism for psychological inflexibility. The findings also suggest that changing inflexible patterns of behavior may be more important than the capacity to notice such changes. These results are further interpreted in relation to interventions for college student mental and emotional health.

Mindfulness, purposeful attention without judgment or acceptance, and related practices are increasingly popular with a large number of people and have been incorporated into many western psychotherapies (e.g., Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy). There is considerable debate over whether mindfulness is best studied as a state, trait or procedure. Although many studies have found that trait mindfulness is related to physical and mental health outcomes, less is known about the mechanism(s) through which mindfulness enhances clinical outcomes. The current study explored the role of potential mediators of the relationship between trait mindfulness and psychological outcomes, i.e., psychological distress. Specifically, we examined whether the relationship between trait mindfulness and psychological distress is indirect, with mediators such as emotion regulation (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression, experiential avoidance, cognitive flexibility (i.e., alternative), and psychological inflexibility accounting for the relationship. We measured trait mindfulness, psychological distress, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, experiential avoidance and acceptance in a large sample of undergraduate students. We hypothesized that the relationship between trait mindfulness and psychological outcomes is indirect and may be due to enhanced acceptance, flexibility, and emotion regulation. We conducted a sequential regression, simple mediational, and multiple mediational analyses to test hypotheses. Results revealed that the proposed mediators explained additional variances in psychological distress above and beyond trait mindfulness. The simple mediational analyses indicated that individually, psychological inflexibility, emotion regulation (only cognitive reappraisal), and experiential avoidance mediated the relationship between trait mindfulness and psychological distress. Finally, the multiple mediational analysis revealed that, when tested simultaneously, only psychological inflexibility mediated the association between trait mindfulness and psychological distress. Implications of results for developing treatment packages that include mindfulness practices are discussed. Limitations of the cross-sectional design, the measurements, and definitional issues of trait mindfulness are discussed as well.

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Abstract Rule-governed behavior is a unique form of human behavior that comes with many advantages. Rule-following can however become problematic when it makes us insensitive to the consequences of our behavior and undermines our ability to adapt to changes in contingencies. This phenomenon has been hypothesized to play a central role in different psychological problems. In this thesis project, we investigated whether a mindfulness exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) could improve people's ability to adapt to changes in contingencies, as measured with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We also explored whether recently developed self-report questionnaires of rule-governed behavior, the Generalized Pliance Questionnaire (GPQ-9) and the Generalized Tracking Questionnaire (GTQ) could predict the participants' performance on the WCST. In addition, we looked at the association between intolerance of uncertainty (IUS-12) and generalized pliance (GPQ-9). The sample consisted of 45 university students at Örebro university in Sweden. The results revealed that the brief mindfulness exercise did not improve the participants ability to adapt to contingency changes. The questionnaires of rule-governed behavior also did not predict this performance on the WCST. However, we found a novel association between generalized pliance and intolerance of uncertainty, which could be a future research path. Further, generalized pliance and generalized tracking displayed a moderate negative correlation, in line with previous research. Despite limited significant findings in this study, it was an effort to investigate central claims from the ACTand behavioral literature, centered around psychological flexibility and rule-governed behavior.

As a whole, eating disorders have been characterised as having the following key features: a persistent over concern with body size and shape; and weight control behaviours such as fasting, exercise, and self-induced vomiting. However, there tends to be a blurred line between those that do and do not meet diagnostic thresholds as the level of psychological distress is comparably similar. This study examined whether psychological inflexibility (from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy perspective) was associated with eating disorders and whether it mediated the relationship between childhood abuse and invalidation and eating disorders. This was considered to be important because high rates of abuse have consistently been found in this population, yet not everyone goes on to develop an eating disorder. In addition, the role of emotional abuse has been largely neglected. A clinical sample of 190 participants with a clinical or subclinical eating disorder were recruited from eating disorder charities and support forums; they completed a range of questionnaires measuring experiences of abuse and maternal/paternal emotional invalidation in childhood, current levels of cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance and current levels of eating pathology. The sample was split into three groups based on their Eating Disorder Risk Composite scores: elevated, typical and low clinical range. It was found that those in the elevated clinical range (most severe eating pathology) had the poorest emotional processing and significantly higher levels of psychological inflexibility, thought-shape-fusion, depression and anxiety than those in the low clinical range (least severe eating pathology). In terms of predicting current levels of eating pathology, three variables emerged as significant predictors: emotional processing, thought-shape fusion and depression. In terms of predicting current levels of psychological inflexibility, five variables emerged as significant predictors: childhood emotional abuse, emotional processing, thought-shape-fusion, depression and anxiety. The results add novel findings to the literature regarding the role of early experiences on the development of psychological inflexibility, and the role of psychological inflexibility in the maintenance of eating pathology and psychological distress. Clinical implications of these findings in relation to assessment, formulation, intervention and prevention are discussed.