In plain language
Psychological flexibility — the capacity to adapt your behavior when what you are doing is not working — is thought to be central to mental health. But how does flexibility (and its opposite, rigidity) actually play out in everyday life, moment to moment? This study followed 114 young adults aged 19 to 32 for three weeks, pinging them repeatedly throughout each day (roughly every three hours) to report on their current negative and positive emotions, negative and positive thoughts, and their sense of being flexibly adaptive versus stuck and unable to change ineffective behavior. These items came from the Process-Based Assessment Tool (PBAT).
The researchers used dynamic network analysis to map how these psychological processes influenced each other, both at the same moment and from one time point to the next. Rigidity emerged as the most central process in the system. At any given moment, rigidity was the most strongly connected node in the network, and over time it was the strongest driver of what came next: feeling stuck predicted more negative thoughts and feelings, and fewer positive thoughts, feelings, and adaptive variability, in the hours that followed.
The findings suggest that constricted psychological flexibility may set maladaptive cognitive and emotional processes in motion, underscoring why rigidity is a promising target for prevention and treatment aimed at young adults’ mental health.
Key findings
- Using ecological momentary assessment, 114 young adults (ages 19-32) were assessed intensively over 3 weeks, and their data were modeled as dynamic networks of psychological processes.
- Rigidity showed the highest strength centrality in the contemporaneous network (S = 0.83) — it was the most interconnected process at any given moment, a result that held in 100% of bootstrap stability checks.
- Rigidity also had the highest out-strength centrality in the temporal network (OS = 0.33; highest in 88.8% of bootstrap iterations), meaning it was the strongest predictor of other processes at the next time point.
- Rigidity predicted more negative thoughts and emotions and fewer positive processes (and less adaptive variation) in the immediate future; negative affect, negative cognition, and rigidity mutually reinforced each other over time (significant paths from beta = 0.05 to 0.10).
- Adaptive variation was more strongly associated with positive processes, whereas rigidity was more strongly associated with negative processes; positive affect at one time point predicted greater flexibility at the next (beta = 0.06).
- The networks revealed extensive feedback loops among processes, consistent with the idea that self-reinforcing loops can stabilize both adaptive and maladaptive mental states.
How to cite
APA
Westhoff, M., Heshmati, S., Siepe, B., Vogelbacher, C., Ciarrochi, J., Hayes, S. C., & Hofmann, S. G. (2024). Psychological flexibility and cognitive-affective processes in young adults' daily lives. Scientific Reports, 14, 8182. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58598-3
BibTeX
@article{westhoff2024psychological,
author = {Westhoff, Marlon and Heshmati, Saida and Siepe, Bj{\"o}rn and Vogelbacher, Christoph and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Hayes, Steven C. and Hofmann, Stefan G.},
title = {Psychological flexibility and cognitive-affective processes in young adults' daily lives},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
year = {2024},
volume = {14},
pages = {8182},
doi = {10.1038/s41598-024-58598-3}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
- The Process-Based Assessment Tool (free download)
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.