Shared Variance Among Self-Report and Behavioral Measures of Distress Intolerance

Abstract

Distress intolerance may be an important individual difference variable in understanding maladaptive coping responses across diagnostic categories. However, the measurement of distress intolerance remains inconsistent across studies and little evidence for convergent validity among existing measures is available. This study evaluated the overlap among self-report and behavioral measures of distress intolerance in four samples, including an unselected sample, a sample of patients with drug dependence, and two samples of cigarette smokers. Results suggested that the self-report measures were highly correlated, as were the behavioral measures; however, behavioral and self-report measures did not exhibit significant associations with each other. There was some evidence of domain specificity, with anxiety sensitivity demonstrating strong associations with somatic distress intolerance, and a lack of association between behavioral measures that elicit affective distress and those that elicit somatic distress. These findings highlight a potential divergence in the literature relative to the conceptualization of distress intolerance as either sensitivity to distress or as the inability to persist at a task when distressed. Further research is needed to elucidate the conceptualization and measurement of distress intolerance to facilitate future clinical and research applications of this construct.

Differential Associations Between Perceived and Objective Measurement of Distress Tolerance in Relation to Antiretroviral Treatment Adherence and Response Among HIV-Positive Individuals

“…It is important to also note that, consistent with prior studies (Marshall-Berenz et al, 2010;McHugh et al, 2011), we observed self-report distress tolerance (DTS) not to be significantly associated with the employed behavioral measure of distress tolerance (i.e., MTPT-C). Here, the contexts in which the two forms of distress tolerance were assessed differ.…”

“…Moreover, the perceived inability to handle distress is defined as a cognitive factor, broadly, whereas task persistence in the face of distress is defined behaviorally (McHugh & Otto, 2012b). The absence of significant associations between perceived and objective distress tolerance may be in part due to the different types of distress (e.g., anxiety, frustration) and measurement contexts (i.e., in vivo vs. self-reported perceptions; McHugh & Otto, 2012b;McHugh et al, 2011). In addition, the measurement of perceived distress tolerance relies on self-report, which presents a challenge because of the difficulty participants have in accurately reflecting upon and discriminating their sensitivity to distress from their tolerance of distress (McHugh & Otto, 2012b;Sloan & Kring, 2007).…”

“…As there is inherent difficulty in participants accurately identifying motives for their behavior, along with the potential for inflated correlations with sharedmethod variance (Lindell & Whitney, 2001), reliance on only self-report methodologies for examining distress tolerance (i.e., perceived tolerance of distress) may be problematic. As such, it is recommended to include both self-report and behavioral measures when assessing distress tolerance (Marshall-Berenz, Vujanovic, Bonn-Miller, Bernstein, & Zvolensky, 2010;McHugh et al, 2011).…”

“…); and (b) the effect of distress tolerance would be observed above and beyond the contribution of negative affectivity and ART sideeffect severity. We also sought to explore whether the two employed measures of distress tolerance would differentially relate to the objective indices of adherence, ART response, and immunological status, given differential relations observed in past work (Marshall-Berenz et al, 2010;McHugh et al, 2011).…”

Distress Tolerance, Emotion Dysregulation, and Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms Among HIV+ Individuals

“…Future research could decrease this risk by utilizing multi-method approaches (e.g., behavioral distress tolerance tasks). Indeed, self-report and behavioral indices of distress tolerance are often not highly related Marshall-Berenz et al 2010;McHugh et al 2011). Fifth, the study criterion variables were limited to anxiety/depression variables.…”