Accepting, believing, and striving:

Identifying the distinctive psychological flexibility profiles of

underweight, overweight, and obese people in a large American Sample

Joseph Ciarrochia, Baljinder Sahdraa , Sarah Marshalla, Philip Parkera, Caroline Horwathb

a University of Western Sydney, Center for Positive Psychology and Education and School of Social Sciences and Psychology

b University of Otago, Department of Human Nutrition 

Self asContext

Contact with the Present Moment

Defusion

Acceptance

Committed Action

Values

Psychological Inflexibility

Attachment to unhelpful self-concepts

Avoiding internal experiences

Believing/being dominated by

unhelpful thoughts

Persistent inaction,

impulsivity, or avoidance

Unclear values; Compliance,

living for avoidance

Weak awareness of present; Thoughts of past

or future dominate

Profile analyses

1. Mean tests: Are there overall differences between BMI groups?

2. Parallelism: Are their different patterns of results for each weight category? 

Low Accepting: Multidimensional experiential avoidance scale (Gamez, et al,

2011)1. Behavioral avoidance (I won’t do something if I think it will make

me uncomfortable”)

2. Distress aversion (I would do anything to feel less stressed”)

3. Distraction and suppression (When something upsetting comes up, I try very hard to stop thinking about it”)

4. Repression/denial (I am able to turn off my emotions when I don’t want to feel”)

5. procrastination (I tend to put off unpleasant things that need to get done

6. Distress endurance (Even when I feel uncomfortable, I don’t give up working toward things I value”).

Being emotionally aware (Bagby, et al., 1994)

When I am upset, I don’t know if I am sad, frightened, or angry

It is difficult for me to find the right words for my feelings.

Believing/fusing

Hope and self-esteem (Snyder, 2000; Rosenberg, 1965)

Drexel Defusion Scale (Forman et al., 2012). Defusion explained in detail. Meaures the extent people defuse from thoughts about each of ten situations

Cognitive fusion Questionnaire (Gillnnders, et al., 2013). The extent thoughts are distressing, entaingling and interfer with action

Striving

Idiographic component followed by a series of

likert questions (Emmons and Mcadams, 1991)

Idiographic: …” think of personal strivings as the goals that you typically try to obtain in your life “

Likert: Controlled and authentic reasons for striving, importance of striving, and extent making progress on striving, and

Methods Planned missing data design

Representative sample

N = 7884;

3748 males; 4136 females;

Mean age =47.9, SD=16

Self-reported weight: very high correlation with objective weight (e.g., r > .95)

Multiple imputation data set. Unbiased way of handling missing data

Men and Avoidance

Women and avoidance

Men and believing/defusing

Women and believing/defusing

Men and emotional awareness

Women and Emotional Awareness

Men and striving: quantitative

Women and striving: quantitative

Men and striving: qualitative

Women and striving: qualitative

Discussion

Overweight men and women

Underweight men

Defensive but active

High avoidance and high fusion, and extremely low awareness, but also a high willingness to experience distress

Highest belief in ability to achieve goals (hope) but those goals tend to be controlled and focused on self-presentation

Qualitative analysis of strivings indicate low avoidance

Underweight women

Low on avoidant strivings, high on self-presentation concern

High hope, average self-esteem

Low emotional awareness

High controlled strivings

Low avoidance strivings, low health/generative strivings, high self-concern strivings

Obese men

Procrastination, Avoidant strivings

Lower emotional awareness

Obese women

High procrastination, low distress endurance

Low awareness

Low hope and sense of social worth

Low progress on strivings