Accepting, believing, and striving : Identifying the distinctive psychological flexibility profiles of underweight, overweight, and obese people in a large American Sample Joseph Ciarrochi a, Baljinder Sahdra a, Sarah Marshall a, Philip Parker a, Caroline Horwath b a University of Western Sydney, Center for Positive Psychology and Education and School of Social Sciences and Psychology b University of Otago, Department of Human Nutrition

Profile analyses 1. Mean tests: Are there overall differences between BMI groups? 2. Parallelism: Are their different patterns of results for each weight category?

Low Accepting: Multidimensional experiential avoidance scale (Gamez, et al, 2011) 1. Behavioral avoidance (I won’t do something if I think it will make me uncomfortable”) 2. Distress aversion (I would do anything to feel less stressed”) 3. Distraction and suppression (When something upsetting comes up, I try very hard to stop thinking about it”) 4. Repression/denial (I am able to turn off my emotions when I don’t want to feel”) 5. procrastination (I tend to put off unpleasant things that need to get done 6. Distress endurance (Even when I feel uncomfortable, I don’t give up working toward things I value”).

Being emotionally aware (Bagby, et al., 1994) ✤ When I am upset, I don’t know if I am sad, frightened, or angry ✤ It is difficult for me to find the right words for my feelings.

Believing/fusing ✤ Hope and self-esteem (Snyder, 2000; Rosenberg, 1965) ✤ Drexel Defusion Scale (Forman et al., 2012). Defusion explained in detail. Meaures the extent people defuse from thoughts about each of ten situations ✤ Cognitive fusion Questionnaire (Gillnnders, et al., 2013). The extent thoughts are distressing, entaingling and interfer with action

Striving ✤ Idiographic component followed by a series of likert questions (Emmons and Mcadams, 1991) ✤ Idiographic: …” think of personal strivings as the goals that you typically try to obtain in your life “ ✤ Likert: Controlled and authentic reasons for striving, importance of striving, and extent making progress on striving, and

Methods ✤ Planned missing data design ✤ Representative sample ✤ N = 7884; ✤ 3748 males; 4136 females; ✤ Mean age =47.9, SD=16 ✤ Self-reported weight: very high correlation with objective weight (e.g., r >.95) ✤ Multiple imputation data set. Unbiased way of handling missing data

Men and Avoidance

Women and avoidance

Men and believing/defusing

Women and believing/defusing

Men and emotional awareness

Women and Emotional Awareness

Men and striving: quantitative

Women and striving: quantitative

Men and striving: qualitative

Women and striving: qualitative

Discussion

Overweight men and women

Underweight men ✤ Defensive but active ✤ High avoidance and high fusion, and extremely low awareness, but also a high willingness to experience distress ✤ Highest belief in ability to achieve goals (hope) but those goals tend to be controlled and focused on self- presentation ✤ Qualitative analysis of strivings indicate low avoidance

Underweight women ✤ Low on avoidant strivings, high on self-presentation concern ✤ High hope, average self-esteem ✤ Low emotional awareness ✤ High controlled strivings ✤ Low avoidance strivings, low health/generative strivings, high self-concern strivings

Obese men ✤ Procrastination, Avoidant strivings ✤ Lower emotional awareness

Obese women ✤ High procrastination, low distress endurance ✤ Low awareness ✤ Low hope and sense of social worth ✤ Low progress on strivings