First Things First: Parent Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion During COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about significant stress and anxiety for many parents around the world. Psychological flexibility and self-care are fundamental aspects of psychological health. For parents, shaping these processes may help promote family nurturance, support children's prosocial behavior, and provide effective and consistent use of evidence-based parenting "kernels." The goal of this article is to provide practitioners with evidence-based tools that will support psychological flexibility, self-care, and positive parenting behaviors in caregivers during COVID-19 and beyond.

From Helpless to Hero: Promoting Values-Based Behavior and Positive Family Interaction in the Midst of COVID-19.

Parents managing their home environments during government-ordered stay-at-home periods are likely to need new skills for occupying their children's time with activities that promote health and emotional well-being. Moreover, parents and children know they need help managing these circumstances. Perhaps for the first time, behavior analysts hold the reinforcers for increasing parental involvement in effective child-rearing practices. In fact, behavior analysts can help parents enlist their children in managing the household by framing their behavior in terms of hidden superpowers. In the current article, we argue that behavior analysts have a range of tools to offer that are grounded in evidence-based principles, strategies, and kernels-or essential units of behavioral influence. When combined into scheduled daily practices and invoked by children taught to see their use of the tools as nothing short of heroic, these practices function as "vaccinations" that inoculate families against toxic and unsafe behaviors.

The Role of Psychological Flexibility as a Mediator Between Experienced Sexual Racism and Psychological Distress Among Men of Color Who Have Sex with Men.

Previous research has shown that individuals belonging to multiple marginalized groups experience higher levels of psychological distress, which is linked to experiencing discrimination based on their multiple marginalized identities. One way that gay and bisexual men of color face discrimination is in the dating and sexual situations within the men who have sex with men community, which is sometimes termed sexual racism. Previous research has found that experienced discrimination on the basis of their race/ethnicity is positively related to depressive symptoms. The present study examined whether psychological flexibility mediates the effect of experiencing sexual racism on psychological distress. In this study, 439 men of color who have sex with men completed a series of questionnaires online on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results showed that the indirect effects of experiencing sexual racism through psychological flexibility on depression (95% CI .22, .39), anxiety (95% CI .15, .29), and stress (95% CI .18, .33) were significant while controlling for demographic variables. Therefore, this model showed that psychological flexibility mediated and explained the effect of experiencing sexual racism on psychological distress. Clinical implications and future avenues of research are discussed.

Examining sexual racism and body dissatisfaction among men of color who have sex with men: The moderating role of body image inflexibility.

Body image research with men who have sex with men (MSM) has largely focused on White MSM. The current study aimed to investigate whether men of color who have sex with men (MCSM) report similar levels of body dissatisfaction as White MSM. We also studied whether (a) the experience of sexual racism, a unique stressor for MCSM, is related to body dissatisfaction and (b) body image inflexibility moderates the relationship between sexual racism and muscularity-oriented behaviors. White MSM and MCSM (total N = 887) recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk completed questionnaires assessing body dissatisfaction, body image flexibility, and experienced sexual racism on Qualtrics. We found that MCSM report more engagement in behaviors aimed at changing their bodies than White MSM. Additionally, experiencing sexual racism was related to higher body dissatisfaction and body image inflexibility in MCSM. In addition, body image inflexibility moderated by strengthening the association between experiencing sexual racism and muscularity-oriented behaviors. The present study highlights the need for further research with this understudied population, including intervention studies on mitigating the impact of experiencing sexual racism by increasing psychological and body image flexibility and studies aimed at reducing the incidence of sexual racism.

Disentangling Components of Flexibility via the Hexaflex Model: Development and Validation of the Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI).

The current study developed the 60-item Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI)-a scale assessing the 12 dimensions of the Hexaflex model. We created an exhaustive pool of 554 items including 22 of the most widely used measures from the acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness literatures. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used in combination with item response theory and responsiveness to change analyses in 3,040 online respondents across three studies ( NStudy 1 = 372; NStudy 2 = 2,150; NStudy 3 = 518) to create the MPFI. Associations between the MPFI subscales and an array of existing measures supported its convergent and discriminant validities. The MPFI offers acceptance and commitment therapy researchers new tools for elaborating treatment effects.

The impact of acceptance-based versus avoidance-based protocols on discomfort.

This study aimed to isolate the conditions under which aversive stimulation is experienced as more or less discomforting/unpleasant. Discomfort was induced by playing loud noises through headphones while participants performed computer tasks. We employed 4 main conditions. Condition 1: the acceptance-based protocol (ACT), intended to integrate discomfort in a valued direction, was implemented before the Inclusion Task (task performance could continue despite the presence of the noise). Subsequently, the experiential avoidance-based protocol (EA), intended to promote a relation of opposition between discomfort and valued actions, was implemented before the Opposition Task (task performance was suspended until the participants eliminated the sounds). Condition 2: this order was reversed. Conditions 3 and 4: the tasks were presented without any protocol. The ACT protocol produced the lowest level of discomfort, particularly when it was implemented before participants had experimental experience in trying to control discomfort. Two postcontrol conditions confirmed this result. Implications for prevention and treatment of psychological suffering are discussed.

Instructional effects on performance in a matching-to-sample study.

Conducting studies using an undergraduate participant pool is fraught with difficulties. Among them are problems with adequately motivating subjects both to come to the study, and once there, to actively engage the experimental task. Thirty-one college students participated in a matching-to-sample (MTS) study involving substantial training, testing, retraining, and retesting of conditional discriminations and equivalence relations among four 4-member classes of nonsensical words. The study was conducted during the end of the semester, when performance often had been observed to be poorer than at other points in the semester. Eleven of the participants, in addition to standard instructions about the task, received additional instructions specifying molar consequences for high rates of "correct" responses throughout the procedure. This subset of participants displayed markedly improved performance as compared to those who did not receive the additional instructions. Results suggest that specification of molar contingencies improves participants' sensitivity to molecular contingencies within the study. Instructions that specify and increase the consequential functions of feedback provided during MTS trials may be one means of reducing unwanted variability in human MTS performance.

Distress tolerance treatment for early-lapse smokers: rationale, program description, and preliminary findings.

A significant percentage of individuals attempting smoking cessation lapse within a matter of days, and very few are able to recover to achieve long-term abstinence. This observation suggests that many smokers may have quit-attempt histories characterized exclusively by early lapses to smoking following quit attempts. Recent negative-reinforcement conceptualizations of early lapse to smoking suggest that individuals' reactions to withdrawal and inability to tolerate the experience of these symptoms, rather than withdrawal severity itself, may represent an important treatment target in the development of new behavioral interventions for this subpopulation of smokers. This article presents the theoretical rationale and describes a novel, multicomponent distress-tolerance treatment for early-lapse smokers that incorporates behavioral and pharmacological elements of standard smoking-cessation treatment, whereas drawing distress-tolerance elements from exposure-based and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based treatment approaches. Preliminary data from a pilot study (N = 16) are presented, and clinical implications are discussed.

A preliminary investigation of the use of acceptance and commitment therapy in group treatment for social phobia

El estudio examina el impacto de un protocolo de tratamiento en grupo basado en la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso (ACT) dirigido a las conductas de evitación y problemas de la vida típicos de personas con ansiedad social. Veintidos participantes formaron el grupo de tratamiento desarrollado a lo largo de 10 sesiones, en el que doce completaron el tratamiento. Los datos del postratamiento y seguimiento muestran un descenso significativo en las medidas de fobia social y evitación experiencial (tamaño del efecto en seguimiento: 0,83 y 1.71, respectivamente). Las puntuaciones de los participantes que completaron el tratamiento sobre la efectividad en resolver los problemas típicos en la vida, especialmente relaciones sociales, aumentaron significativamente en el seguimiento. Los síntomas descendieron aun no siendo objetivo del tratamiento, lo que sugiere que su descenso pudo resultar de una mayor disposición a experimentar emociones aversivas y a implicarse en conductas sociales consistentes con los valores de los participantes, y que previamente evitaban. A pesar de su naturaleza exploratoria y sus limitaciones, el estudio proporciona una base para la aplicación de ACT a este tipo de población

The present study examined the impact of a group treatment protocol based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that was tailored toward the avoidant behaviors and life problems typical for socially anxious persons. Twenty-two participants enrolled in the group treatment, which consisted of 10 sessions. Twelve participants completed treatment. Post-treatment and follow-up data revealed significant decreases on the social phobia and experiential avoidance measures (follow-up effect sizes: 0.83 and 1.71, respectively). Completers’ ratings of effectiveness in living, specifically pertaining to social relationships, significantly increased at follow-up. Symptoms decreased despite their not being a treatment target. This results suggests that symptom improvement may result from an increased willingness to both experience aversive emotions and engage in social behaviors that are consistent with what the participants valued, but previously avoided. Despite its exploratory nature and limitations, the study provides a basis for further application of ACT in this population

Use of paradoxical intention in the context of acceptance and commitment therapy.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of therapeutic paradox within the contextual-behavioral treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Emphasis is on the difference between inherent and constructed paradox, expanding on previous work and emphasizing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy's relationship to Logotherapy.