Stop Being So Rigid: The Interplay of Psychological Flexibility and Cognitive-Affective Processes in the Daily Lives of Young Adults

@misc{westhoff2023stop,
  author = {Westhoff, Marlon and Heshmati, Saeideh and Siepe, Björn and Vogelbacher, Christoph and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Hayes, Steven C. and Hofmann, Stefan G.},
  title = {Stop Being So Rigid: The Interplay of Psychological Flexibility and Cognitive-Affective Processes in the Daily Lives of Young Adults},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Research Square Platform LLC},
  doi = {10.21203/rs.3.rs-3742788/v1}
}

The version of record was published as: 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

In plain language

Young adulthood is a period of rapid change — new roles, relationships, and identities — and coping with it well depends on psychological flexibility: the ability to adjust your thoughts, feelings, and behavior to fit the situation and your values. This study asked how two faces of that capacity — adaptive variability (trying different responses) and maladaptive rigidity (feeling stuck and unable to change ineffective behavior) — interact with positive and negative thoughts and emotions as they unfold in everyday life.

Using Ecological Momentary Assessment, 114 young adults aged 19 to 32 answered repeated smartphone-style surveys over three weeks, generating intensive time-series data on their moment-to-moment flexibility, rigidity, cognition, and affect. The researchers then modelled these variables as a dynamic network, mapping both how the processes relate at the same time point (contemporaneous network) and how they predict one another over time (temporal network).

Rigidity emerged as the most influential node in the system. It had the strongest outgoing connections in the temporal network — predicting more negative thoughts and feelings, and fewer positive ones, in the immediate future — and the highest strength centrality in the contemporaneous network. The findings suggest that feeling stuck is not just a symptom but may help drive downward spirals of negative experience, making psychological flexibility a promising target for supporting young adults’ mental health. (The peer-reviewed version of record of this preprint appeared in Scientific Reports in 2024.)

Key findings

• Rigidity showed the strongest directed associations in the temporal network (out-strength 0.33 vs. 0.14 for variation), predicting future negative cognitive-affective experiences and inversely predicting positive experiences and variation.
• Rigidity also had the highest strength centrality in the contemporaneous network, with particularly strong same-moment associations with negative affect and negative cognition.
• Adaptive variation was the least connected node, with bidirectional links only to rigidity and positive cognition; positive affect also predicted variation, suggesting variation may be more an endpoint than a driver.
• Processes of the same valence clustered together: positive cognition, positive affect, and variation were positively correlated, while opposite-valence processes were negatively associated.
• Both networks showed extensive interconnections and feedback loops, which may stabilize adaptive or maladaptive states and help explain the persistence of mental health problems.
• The study used intensive longitudinal data (Ecological Momentary Assessment over 3 weeks) from 114 young adults aged 19–32, analysed with dynamic network modelling.

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.