EF Science

Indeed, research on psychological flexibility has for the past five decades traveled by a multitude of different names, among them ego-resiliency (Block, 1961), executive control (Posner & Rothbart, 1998), response modulation (Patterson & Newman, 1993), and self-regulation (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000)

Psychological flexibility actually refers to a number of dynamic processes that unfold over time. This could be reflected by how a person: (1) adapts to fluctuating situational demands, (2) reconfigures mental resources, (3) shifts perspective, and (4) balances competing desires, needs, and life domains.

one might question whether any regulatory strategy provides universal benefits, as opposed to contingent benefits that hinge on the situation and the values and goals that we import.

These pathological processes span cognitive rigidities such as rumination and worry (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008), patterns of behavioral perseveration, as well as a relative inability to rebound following stressful events, and difficulties planning and working for distant goals.

As these skills flourish, people become more versatile and more adept at committing finite attention and energy to meaningful interests and values (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999)

At subjective, behavioral, and biological levels of analysis, researchers continue to find that psychopathology is relatively independent from positive experiences

The work on ego-resiliency is extensive. Briefly, an important prediction is that ego-resilience would be associated with greater progression through the stage of identity development from being young and impulsive to learning social rules and conforming and for the most mature, advanced stages such as being wise and self-determined (Loevinger, 1987)

Instead, consider the flexible application of different types of emotional expression as the situation warrants.

the ability to modulate behavior as required by the situation contributed to real-world adjustment over and above any particular regulatory strategy.

Interestingly, variability in appraisals and coping strategies was positively related to the effectiveness of handling stressors. More importantly, the 30% of people demonstrating coping flexibility were better adjusted on a daily basis and showed less anxiety and depressive symptoms over a 1-week period than people demonstrating more rigid adherence to particular coping strategies, regardless of whether they were problem- or emotion-focused, active- or passive-focused. These findings on the benefits of flexibility compared with any particular configuration of self-regulatory strategies have been replicated in subsequent experimental and prospective studies (e.g., Cheng, 2003; Cheng & Cheung, 2005).

By ego-resiliency, we meant…a dynamic ability to temporarily change from modal reaction or perceptual tendencies to reactions and percepts responsive to the immediately pressing situation and, more generally, to the inevitably fluctuating situational demands of life. In particular, the ego-resiliency construct entailed the ability to, within personal limits, situationally reduce behavioral control as well as to situationally increase behavioral control, to expand attention as well as to narrow attention, to regress in the service of the ego as well as to progress in the service of the ego…The relatively unresilient or vulnerable individual displayed little adaptive flexibility, was disquieted by the new and altered, was perseverative or diffuse in responding to the changed or strange, was made anxious before competing demands, and had difficulty in recouping from the traumatic.

Rumination involves stereotypical and perseverative thinking about the reasons for and meaning of one’s own sad, dysphoric affect. Not only is a ruminative response style inflexible in that it involves habitual application of circular, looping thoughts, it also represents a passive, inactive mode that displaces more active engagement with the environment; engagement that could potentially relieve depressed mood.

Upon reaching more mature stages of identity development, young adults are visibly more flexible in multiple contexts compared with less mature peers.

Besides the development of maturity and wisdom, the most characteristic features of ego-resilient children and adolescents (as rated by teachers, parents, and independent observers) include: vitality, curious and exploratory, self-reliant and confident, creative, an abundance of meaningful experiences, abilities to effectively master challenges, and quick recovery following stressful events (Gjerde, Block, & Block, 1986; Klohnen, 1996).

Equally useful to understanding the psychologically flexible person are the least representative features of ego-resilient youth: rigid repetitive strategies to handle stress, socially inappropriate emotional expressiveness, and discomfort in unpredictable and challenging environments.

Although causality cannot be determined, flexibility appears to move people from extrinsic motivated actions toward self-determination and the related health benefits

psychological flexibility was on average correlated .42 with outcomes ranging from job performance and satisfaction over a 1-year interval, daily activity engagement in pain patients, and mental health (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006)

Emotional preferences should hinge on the goals people are inclined to pursue. We have not given due consideration to the task of identifying which emotions are functional and at what levels of intensity and type of expressiveness. Sometimes negative, unpleasant emotions can be more useful than positive emotions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, teaching people this knowledge, is to explicitly address psychological flexibility.

Another perspective on the health benefits of psychological flexibility arrives from work on the ability to switch one’s focus from one life domain to another, one time perspective to another, and ensure that various important elements of a person’s identity are being satisfied in a harmonious manner.

If these examples suggest anything, it is that greater satisfaction and meaning in life can be captured by shifting temporal perspectives when the situation requires a particular mode of being (Boniwell & Zimbardo, 2004).

Similarly, recent daily-diary and prospective studies show that when time is allocated effectively in important life domains (e.g., work, school, leisure, relationships) to minimize discrepancy between a person’s actual day-to-day activities and their ideal, greater well-being is experienced. This includes life satisfaction, frequent positive emotions, infrequent negative emotions, and the ability to satisfy needs involving belonging, competence, and autonomy (Sheldon, Cummins, & Khamble, in press)

As we will highlight below, a signal feature of many disorders is that a person’s fluid transactions with the environment break down and responses become stereotyped and invariable.

Ironically, by being flexible and living in service of our deepest values instead of being narrowly focused on achieving happiness, we end up experiencing more frequent joy and meaning in life and less distress; we end up with greater vitality and degrees of freedom for how to live each moment (Hayes et al., 1999, 2004).

Recent extensions add important layers of complexity by suggesting that researchers and clinicians should look beyond the stereotypically negative content of attributions as a marker of depression risk to consider (1) the process of fixedly deploying the same attributions across different situations, a construct known as explanatory inflexibility (Moore & Fresco, 2007), and (2) the connections between an inflexible explanatory style and inflexible coping behavior (Fresco, William, & Nugent, 2006).

one commonality involves psychological inflexibility with respect to responses involving fear and anxiety.

Our premise, shared with the “acceptance-based approaches,” is that a flexible approach to one’s experiences will be associated with health and well-being, even when those experiences are sometimes painful.

There is growing evidence that the anxiety disorders are characterized by experiential avoidance for a variety of experiences, whether it is the experience of bodily arousal in panic disorder (Zvolensky & Eifert, 2000), the fear of strong emotional impulses in generalized anxiety disorder (McLaughlin, Mennin, & Farach, 2007), or concerns about openly expressing and exposing intense emotional experiences to other people (Kashdan & Steger, 2006). In turn, avoidance responses, as they become the default behavioral response, maintain the disorder over time.

Finally, as with depression, anxiety disorders are associated with inflexibility of physiological responding. Perhaps most notably, researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals with anxiety disorder exhibit reduced flexibility in autonomic responding (e.g., Thayer, Friedman, & Borkovec, 1996)

In fact, the pervasive and widespread nature of evidence for inflexibility in so many different response systems in so many different mental disorders is potentially overwhelming. Can these problems be reduced to a smaller core set? If so, what are the most important forms of inflexibility?

For example, individuals with higher resting CVC perform better than low CVC individuals on experimental tasks that require executive function. High CVC is associated with good performance on the Stroop task, which requires people to overcome attentional interference, as well as good performance on the n-back task (Johnsen et al., 2003; Hansen, Johnsen, & Thayer, 2003), which is a working memory task that requires people to monitor a continuous sequence of stimuli and remember which stimuli were presented n trials ago.

Relative to participants who did not maintain the exercise routine, those who maintained the exercise regimen had higher resting CVC and better functioning on an executive functioning task

Now that we have demonstrated the benefits of psychological flexibility and the costs of inflexibility, we consider three critical factors that influence the likelihood of being psychologically flexible and gaining access to its benefits:

prioritize and integrate cognitive capacities.

Essentially, executive functioning provides critical neuropsychological support for self-regulation

In fact, as discussed below, it is hard to imagine psychological flexibility without at least adequate performance in this domain.

When someone is described as being psychologically flexible, they are more apt to be versatile, using top-down strategies. That is, they show an awareness of what a situation requires and an ability to organize and prioritize strategies that “fit” the situation rather than relying on dominant, default strategies (Fleeson, 2001).

Another related, essential cognitive function is the ability to tolerate distress and develop an open, receptive attitude toward emotions, thoughts, and sensations.

When a person is unable to accept frustration and unwanted negative experiences, attentional capacity and decision-making capabilities are narrowed.

Instead of flexibly responding to a situation in an active manner, a person preoccupied with avoiding experiences is psychologically unavailable to adapt to the cues afforded by an existing situation.

Other social neuroscience studies provide additional support for the notion that acceptance of and openness to experience, and related emotion regulation processes are bound to executive functioning

Finally, executive functioning also typically includes working memory and recall, information processing speed, and the ability to inhibit behavior. These, too, are relevant to psychological flexibility, for similar reasons.

A weak danger cue in the environment may be prepotent, shutting down executive control, leading a person to conflate their anxious feelings as evidence of the dangerous potential that was never actualized. In the end, this person will be more worried and avoidant in similar, future situations, constricting their life space by tiny portions; a precedent that interferes with flexibility and the pursuit of a pleasurable, engaging, and meaningful life.

Social situations impose even greater demands upon executive functioning because of the need to simultaneously represent the desired outcomes of both the self and the other parties, without compromising either one

If human beings lacked predictive ability and were required to be in conscious control of how to interpret and respond to each gesture in each interaction, social interactions would slow to a crawl, relationships would have to be continually renewed, and it is hard to imagine how social groups and societies would ever form.

in enhancing psychological flexibility

To be adept at forming and maintaining significant, meaningful social relationships, there is utility in recognizing the limitations of our biased social judgments.

end our search for new and potentially useful information about each situation being different (even slightly) from any other (Kashdan, 2009). Although this can be energy consuming, this act prevents misjudgments of people and situations, and increases engagement, creativity, and the type of mindful, compassionate style of communication that is attractive and desirable to other people.

The problem is that habitual thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and goals are easily activated automatically, pulling us toward common well-worn directions as opposed to being sensitive to the unique hedonic or utilitarian value of acting differently (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Foa & Kozak, 1986). Essentially, conscious free will and flexible responding is subtly reduced by habits.

Regardless of origin, there is evidence that humans commonly fail to detect novel distinctions and opportunities in the immediate environment and this can erode psychological flexibility.

Relatively few people can marshal the psychological flexibility to override default mental state in demanding visual tasks.

There is other evidence that experts often attempt to adapt old templates to new situations because of inflated confidence in their abilities to the neglect of contextual information.

Taken together, this line of research suggests that people are relatively insensitive to context and perspective in the present when there is the potential to rely on prior knowledge and experience.

post‐mortem cellular studies of human brains have revealed an extended period of development, in particular in the frontal and parietal cortices.

The term executive function is used to describe the capacity that allows us to control and coordinate our thoughts and behaviour (Luria, 1966; Shallice, 1982).

Behavioural studies show that performance of adolescents on tasks including inhibitory control (Leon‐Carrion, Garcia‐Orza, & Perez‐Santamaria, 2004; Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar, & Sweeney, 2004a), processing speed (Luna et al., 2004a), working memory and decision‐making (Luciana, Conklin, Cooper, & Yarger, 2005; Hooper, Luciana, Conklin, & Yarger, 2004) continues to develop during adolescence.

Different aspects of executive function, therefore, may have different developmental trajectories.

prospective memory continues to develop during adolescence, in line with the notion of frontal maturation in the brain. It is possible that the lack of improvement in performance between the 10‐ and 14‐year‐olds was related to their pubertal status.

The results suggest that there is a dip in performance on this kind of task at the onset of puberty.

The researchers linked this pubertal dip in performance to the proliferation of synapses that occurs at the onset of puberty.

the sudden proliferation of synapses that occurs at puberty results in a perturbation of cognitive performance.

In addition to neural development, there are major changes in hormones at puberty. While it is impossible to tease apart all of the important influences on the social and emotional behaviour of adolescents, significant neural development and hormonal changes are likely to influence social cognition.

Perspective taking is the ability to take on the viewpoint of another person. The ability to take another's perspective is crucial for successful social communication.

Functional neuroimaging studies have revealed that the parietal and frontal cortices are associated with making the distinction between 1PP and 3PP at the motor (Ruby & Decety, 2001), visuo‐spatial, (Vogeley et al., 2004), conceptual (Ruby & Decety, 2003) and emotional (Ruby & Decety, 2004) level.

It is proposed that ‘mirror neurons’ that fire when an agent both performs an action or observes another person performing the action provide a basis for integrating perceptual, motor and social functions (see Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2001 for review).

Several neuroimaging studies have implicated the inferior parietal cortex in the distinction between the self and others at the sensorimotor level (Blakemore, Wolpert, & Frith, 1998; Farrer & Frith, 2002; Ruby & Decety, 2001).

hese data suggest that development of social perspective taking undergoes a perturbation during puberty in parallel with the discontinuous processes of brain maturation.

The greater and more diffuse activity in the dorsal region of the prefrontal cortex in children suggests that there is a heavier dependence on this region in children compared with in adults. The researchers suggested that during adolescence, the network recruited for this task is modified until adulthood, at which stage activation of a smaller, more focal region of the prefrontal cortex is used to perform the same task.

Thus, reaction times and imaging data together suggest that in children, an immature stage of the brain where excess synapses, possibly as a result of a burst of proliferation, accounts for the poorer performance and extensive and less efficient frontal activation. A pruned and more myelinated adult brain could explain the faster reaction times and focal activation of the frontal cortex, the area associated with generativity (Frith, Friston, Liddle, & Frackowiak, 1991) and the inhibitory response (Konishi et al., 1999).

One possibility is that extensive activation in children is a compensatory strategy used while the brain is less efficient in integrating executive functions.

To explain risky behaviour commonly associated with adolescence, the authors postulated that adolescents are driven to seek more extreme incentives to compensate for low recruitment of motivational brain circuitry.

It was proposed that when confronted with a risky scenario, adults’ relatively efficient responses were driven by mental images of possible outcomes and the visceral response to those images, in line with the somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, 1996). However, adolescents relied more on reasoning capacities and therefore activated the DLPFC, hence the relatively effortful responses compared to adults.

The information about the world has to be there, but it also has to be structured in such a way that there is a non-miraculous explanation of how it got there, how it is maintained, and how it actually achieves the preselective effects that are its raison d'être.

Unlike the merely Skinnerian creatures who survive because they are lucky, we Popperian creatures survive because we're smart--of course we're just lucky to be smart, but that's better than just being lucky

actions that were better for their agents.

when you give someone a pair of scissors, you enhance their potential to arrive more safely and swiftly at Smart Moves

Specifically, the interaction between motor coordination and EF had significant effects on language, as the association between EF and language was positive and significant at low and moderate levels of motor skills, but not at high levels of motor skills.

In contrast, the S-RCD group’s poor performance on the planning component remained significant after controlling for phonological processing. Findings suggest reading comprehension difficulties are linked to executive dysfunction; in particular, poor strategic planning/organizing may lead to reading comprehension problems.

Executive Functions—Working Memory Sentence Span (Swanson, Cochran, & Ewers, 1989; based on Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) On this test, the examiner reads a set of sentences and asks a question about one of them. The child answers and then remembers the last word of each sentence. The number of sentences increases by one sentence with each set. The score for total number of words recalled was used in analyses.Spatial Span (WISC-III–Process Instrument; WISC-III-PI; Kaplan, Fein, Kramer, Delis, & Morris, 1999) This measure uses a spatial span board, upon which 10 blue cubes are mounted in a random order. The researcher taps cubes (one cube per second) in a specified sequence, and the child is asked to replicate the sequence, both forward and backward. Scaled scores from the Backward Span trial were used in analyses.Digit Span (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003) Children are asked to repeat aurally presented digit strings, both forward and backward. Scaled scores from the Backward Span trial were used in analyses.

Executive Functions—Planning, Organization, Self-Monitoring Elithorn Mazes (WISC-III-PI; Kaplan et al., 1999) This measure requires the child to examine a visually presented maze and choose a single path that passes through circles within a “lattice” of lines in an inverted triangular structure, without backtracking. The measure provides information about strategic planning and response organization skills. Scaled scores were used in analyses.Trail Making (Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System; D-KEFS; Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001) The entire D-KEFS Trail Making Test was administered; however, scaled scores from Trial 4: Number/Letter Sequencing, for which the participant was required to switch back and forth between connecting numbers and letters in sequence, were used in analyses.Tower (D-KEFS; Delis et al., 2001) The Total Achievement Score from the Tower Test, a measure of a novel problem solving that requires planning and organization, was also administered. For this task, participants must move disks varying in size across three pegs to build a designated tower using the fewest number of moves possible.