The Serbian validation of the Rational-Experiential Inventory-40 and the Rational-Experiential Multimodal Inventory.

The widely used Rational-Experiential Inventory-40 (REI-40) assesses Rational and Experiential thinking styles. Recently, the authors have distinguished three aspects of the Experiential style: Intuition, Emotionality and Imagination and developed the Rational-Experiential Multimodal Inventory (REIm). In this study, we examined the internal consistency, structural/factorial, discriminant and known-groups validity of both REI-40 and REIm, in two samples of Serbian students. Participants in Study 1 (N = 819, mean age M = 19.81, 31% males) completed REI-40 and HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO-PI-R), while participants in Study 2 (N = 304, mean age M = 19.47, 29% males) completed REIm, HEXACO-PI-R and Disintegration inventory DELTA. The internal consistency of both REI version subscales was acceptable to good. The results of CFA analyses indicated an acceptable fit for REI-40, while the structural validity of REIm was poor. Both REI-40 subscales (Rationality and Experientiality), as well as REIm Intuition demonstrated only a small content overlap with basic personality traits, while REIm Experientiality, Emotionality and Imagination correlated highly with Openness and Emotionality. We also observed some gender differences in the expected direction.

Association of childhood maltreatment with adult body awareness and autonomic reactivity: The moderating effect of practicing body psychotherapy.

Research shows the disruptive effects of early maltreatment on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning in adulthood. Psychotherapists not only tend to report higher rates of personal experience with early maltreatment, but also fewer mental problems and disturbances in adulthood, as compared to other professions. However, the role of the ANS in these processes has been understudied despite the relevance of the therapist's psychological state and related nonverbal communication for the therapeutic alliance. By comparing body psychotherapists to the general population, the present study aimed to explore the effects of practicing body psychotherapy (BPT) on the link between early maltreatment and autonomic reactivity in adulthood. An online study included 570 body psychotherapists from 35 countries (54% from the United States, Mage = 52.92, 81% of females) and 592 participants from the U.S. general population (Mage = 51.89, 78% females). We first inspected the factorial structure of the Body Perception Questionnaire-Short Form (Cabrera et al., 2018) in the specific population of BPT practitioners, confirming the three-factor model with one body awareness and two autonomic reactivity factors. Compared to the general population, BPT practitioners reported higher levels of childhood maltreatment, but fewer autonomic symptoms in adulthood, better differentiation of body awareness and autonomic reactivity, and a weaker association between childhood maltreatment experiences and present-day autonomic symptoms. Results are discussed in the framework of polyvagal theory (Porges, 1995, 2011). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Relating Rational and Experiential Thinking Styles With Trait Emotional Intelligence in Broader Personality Space.

The usual distinction between rational and intuitive thinking styles is still a subject of scientific debate, as there is no consensus about their nature, mutual relations and relations to other personality constructs. Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) proposes rational and experiential thinking styles as original personality constructs not fully explainable by five-factor personality models. Following CEST, we aimed to examine: 1. The uniqueness of rational and experiential dimensions by relating them to other personality constructs: trait emotional intelligence (TEI) and HEXACO; 2. Thinking style profiles defined through combined rational and experiential dimensions, and the possible role of TEI in understanding them. A total of 270 undergraduate students (82% females) completed the TEIQue-SF, REI-40, and HEXACO-PI-R. Our results showed that constructs from all three paradigms were low to moderately correlated to each other. TEI had incremental validity in explaining both rational and experiential dimensions, but large amounts of their variances remained unexplained by both TEI and HEXACO. We revealed four thinking style profiles defined through combined rational and experiential dimensions. TEI was the highest when both dimensions were high and the lowest when both were low, which could be related to processes of understanding and managing emotional functioning - proposed as an essential part of TEI, while within CEST they are seen as the way in which rationality influences experientiality. This finding might be of specific significance for understanding irrationality as not exclusively related to high intuition, but to low rationality as well.