Moeck Ella K, Mortlock Jessica, Onie Sandersan, Most Steven B, Koval Peter
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010 Australia.
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Affect Sci. 2022 Oct 7;3(4):836-848. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2. eCollection 2022 Dec.
Psychological inflexibility is theorized to underlie difficulties adjusting mental processes in response to changing circumstances. People show inflexibility across a range of domains, including attention, cognition, and affect. But it remains unclear whether common mechanisms underlie inflexibility in different domains. We investigated this possibility in a pre-registered replication and extension examining associations among attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures. Participants ( = 196) completed lab tasks assessing (a) , the tendency for task-irrelevant emotional stimuli to impair attention allocation to non-emotional stimuli; (b) , the tendency for feelings to persist across time and contexts; and global self-report measures of (c) , the tendency to repeatedly engage in negative self-focused thoughts (i.e., rumination, worry). Based on prior research linking repetitive negative thinking with negative affect inertia, on one hand, and emotion-induced blindness, on the other, we predicted positive correlations among all three measures of inflexibility. However, none of the three measures were related and Bayes factors indicated strong evidence for independence. Supplementary analyses ruled out alternative explanations for our findings, e.g., analytic decisions. Although our findings question the overlap between attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures, this study has methodological limitations. For instance, our measures varied across more than their inflexibility domain and our sample, relative to previous studies, included a high proportion of Asian participants who may show different patterns of ruminative thinking to non-Asian participants. Future research should address these limitations to confirm that common mechanisms do not underlie attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2.
心理灵活性不足被理论化为是在应对不断变化的环境时调整心理过程出现困难的潜在原因。人们在包括注意力、认知和情感在内的一系列领域都表现出灵活性不足。但不同领域的灵活性不足是否存在共同机制仍不清楚。我们在一项预先注册的重复和扩展研究中对此可能性进行了调查，该研究考察了注意力、认知和情感灵活性不足测量之间的关联。参与者（(n = 196)）完成了实验室任务，评估（a）情绪诱导性失明，即与任务无关的情绪刺激损害对非情绪刺激的注意力分配的倾向；（b）消极情绪惯性，即情绪在时间和情境中持续存在的倾向；以及（c）反复进行消极自我关注思维（即沉思、担忧）倾向的整体自我报告测量。基于先前将重复性消极思维与消极情绪惯性以及情绪诱导性失明联系起来的研究，一方面，另一方面，我们预测了所有三种灵活性不足测量之间存在正相关。然而，这三种测量均无关联，贝叶斯因子表明存在独立性的有力证据。补充分析排除了对我们研究结果的其他解释，例如分析决策。尽管我们的研究结果对注意力、认知和情感灵活性不足测量之间的重叠提出了质疑，但本研究存在方法学上的局限性。例如，我们的测量在其灵活性不足领域之外也存在差异，而且相对于先前的研究，我们的样本中亚洲参与者的比例较高，他们可能表现出与非亚洲参与者不同的沉思思维模式。未来的研究应解决这些局限性，以确认注意力、认知和情感灵活性不足不存在共同机制。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2获取的补充材料。
