Psychological inflexibility mediates the relationship between fear of negative evaluation and psychological vulnerability

Abstract

College students worldwide and in Turkey face many biopsychosocial spiritual and economic issues, in part due to developmental and contextual factors. Understanding these issues and their relationship with psychological inflexibility, which is the central concept to the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), is an unexplored gap in the literature. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to examine the mediating and moderating roles of Psychological Inflexibility (PI) in the relationship between Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) and Psychological Vulnerability (PV), and to set an empirical ground for developing evidence-based research and practices based on ACT. The study group consisted of 389 undergraduate students studying in various departments of a mid-sized urban state university. Regression-based mediation and moderation testing procedures revealed that PI partially mediates the relationship between FNE and PV. Moderating role of PI on the same relationship was not verified. The present findings are deemed to be useful for understanding the relationships of these constructs and developing future mental health research and interventions to address biopsychosocial spiritual issues and enhance wellbeing especially from an ACT perspective.

Understanding the Most Important Facilitators and Barriers for Online Education during COVID-19 through Online Photovoice Methodology

“…In studies conducted well before the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey, it was reported that college students experienced several problems (Uğur et al, 2020), and it could be suggested these problems were due to contextual issues including biopsychosocial spiritual and economic factors. It could be suggested that college students experienced problems in in various countries before the COVID-19 pandemic (Becker et al, 2015;Tanhan, 2019;Tanhan & Francisco, 2019).…”

“…It could be suggested that college students experienced problems in in various countries before the COVID-19 pandemic (Becker et al, 2015;Tanhan, 2019;Tanhan & Francisco, 2019). To address the problems experienced by the students both in Turkey and the world and to comprehend their quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, some researchers strongly recommended to employ Online Photovoice (OPV) methodology (Arslan et al, 2020b;Uğur et al, 2020;. This is important because Coronavirus has affected students, instructors, and educational organizations around the globe (Mailizar et al, 2020;Toquero, 2020).…”

Untitled

“…Secondly, although the variables (parental attitudes, time spent on smartphones, gender, age, parents' education status, feeling social) were considered as significant predictors of smartphone addiction, the current study is limited with only these variables. It would be appropriate for researchers to conduct new studies to include more related variables (e.g., quality of life, psychological well-being, negative evaluation, discrimination, satisfaction with one's campus) across contextual levels as some researchers highly recommended (Demir et al, 2021;Uğur, Kaya, & Tanhan, 2020). Third, students may have been biased in their answers as data were collected online.…”

Health in the context of psychological flexibility and acceptance and commitment therapy

“…A study by Masuda and Tully [49] indicated that lower PF in the American student population was associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety. Psychological Inflexibility (PI) in Turkish students partially mediates in the relationship between anxiety against negative evaluation and psychological susceptibility associated with a wide range of mental disorders (with the dominant style of avoidance reactions) [50]. The anxiety of public speaking reported by the student correlated with lower PF in the domains of openness to experience and higher cognitive fusion [51].…”