Blinded by and stuck in negative emotions: Is psychological inflexibility across different domains related?

Abstract

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 study examining associations among attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures. Participants (N = 196) completed lab tasks assessing (a) emotion-induced blindness, the tendency for task-irrelevant emotional stimuli to impair attention allocation to non-emotional stimuli; (b) emotional inertia, the tendency for feelings to persist across time and contexts; and global self-report measures of (c) repetitive negative thinking, 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 hand, 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. Our findings suggest attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility may be driven by domain-specific mechanisms.