Talk:Flexibility (personality)

I have started a new entry on personal flexibility because I noticed in the course of writing another article that there was no such entry in wikipedia, although there are other entries on different kinds of flexibility. Personal flexibility is an important notion in psychology, management theory and organizational theory, and therefore I think making the entry is justified. I aim to expand the stub in future with relevant references. User:Jurriaan 16:41 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I disagree with the removal of my entry on personal flexibility without prior discussion. The new entry provides a biased American psychologist's viewpoint on the topic which does not justice to the viewpoint of hundreds of millions of non-American English speakers. The concept of flexibility of the personality is different from the concept of personal flexibility, since the former refers to relatively stable personal traits while the latter refers to behavioural repertoire, i.e. to behaviours. Any bona fide psychologist can confirm this. User:Jurriaan 2:59 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Student edits to begin
Greta Munger (talk) 15:01, 17 April 2014 (UTC) 1. Genet, J. J., Malooly, A. M., & Siemer, M. (2013). Flexibility is not always adaptive: Affective flexibility and inflexibility predict rumination use in everyday life. Cognition And Emotion, 27(4), 685-695. doi:10.1080/02699931.2012.733351.

This study looked at cognitive flexibility for emotional subjects and whether or not high cognitive flexibility predicts how people respond to negative daily events.

Taylor Haynes (talk) 05:36, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

2. Lee, J. K., & Orsillo, S. M. (2014). Investigating cognitive flexibility as a potential mechanism of mindfulness in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Journal Of Behavior Therapy And Experimental Psychiatry, 45(1), 208-216. doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2013.10.008.

The study examined cognitive flexibility as a mechanism for generalized anxiety disorder. It also looked at what helped improve cognitive flexibility. People with generalized anxiety disorder were found to be inflexible. Mindfulness and relaxation training improved cognitive flexibility.

3. Moyer, D. N., & Sandoz, E. K. (2014). The role of psychological flexibility in the relationship between parent and adolescent distress. Journal Of Child And Family Studies, doi:10.1007/s10826-014-9947-y.

This study looked at how psychological flexibility impacted parent-children relationships during stress.

4. Nath, P., & Pradhan, R. (2014). Does feeling happy contributes to flexible thinking: Exploring the association between positive emotions and cognitive flexibility. Psychological Studies, doi:10.1007/s12646-014-0241-2.

This study examined the relationship between positive emotions and cognitive flexibility.

5. Barbey, A. K., Colom, R., & Grafman, J. (2013). Architecture of cognitive flexibility revealed by lesion mapping. Neuroimage, 82547-554. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.087.

This study was a human lesion study, so the experimenters looked at how lesions in certain parts of the brain impacted cognitive flexibility, among other factors.

6. 6.  Kato, T. (2012). Development of the Coping Flexibility Scale: Evidence for the coping flexibility hypothesis. Journal Of Counseling Psychology, 59(2), 262-273. doi:10.1037/a0027770.

Five were done on Japanese students and employees to see whether or not flexible coping created more beneficial outcomes.

7. Landstra, J. B., Ciarrochi, J., Deane, F. P., & Hillman, R. J. (2013). Identifying and describing feelings and psychological flexibility predict mental health in men with HIV. British Journal Of Health Psychology, 18(4), 844-857. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12026.

The study examined the associations between difficulty identifying describing feelings (DIDF) and psychological flexibility. The study also looked at whether or not DIDF and psychological flexibility impacted the adjustment of men with HIV being screened for cancer.

8. Fledderus, M., Bohlmeijer, E. T., Fox, J., Schreurs, K. G., & Spinhoven, P. (2013). The role of psychological flexibility in a self-help acceptance and commitment therapy intervention for psychological distress in a randomized controlled trial. Behaviour Research And Therapy, 51(3), 142-151. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2012.11.007.

This study looked at how psychological flexibility impacted self-help Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for adults with depression and anxiety.

9. Williams, K. E., Ciarrochi, J., & Heaven, P. L. (2012). Inflexible parents, inflexible kids: A 6-year longitudinal study of parenting style and the development of psychological flexibility in adolescents. Journal Of Youth And Adolescence, 41(8), 1053-1066. doi:10.1007/s10964-012-9744-0.

This study looked at the relationship between what children thought of their parents parenting styles and the children's psychological flexibility over time.

10. Cheng, C. (2001). Assessing coping flexibility in real-life and laboratory settings: A multimethod approach.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,80(5), 814-833. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.80.5.814.

This study tried to see if there was a difference between laboratory participants' flexibility and real world flexibility.

11. Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(4), 865-878. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001.

A literature review of psychological flexibility in psychological health.

12. Bond, F. W., Hayes, S. C., Baer, R. A., Carpenter, K. M., Guenole, N., Orcutt, H. K., Waltz, T., & Zettle, R. D. (2011). Preliminary psychometric properties of the acceptance and action questionnaire-ii: A revised measure of psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance. Behavior Therapy, 42(4), 676-688.

This study attempts to describe a different version of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire, which is a questionnaire that evaluates acceptance, experiential avoidance, and psychological flexibility.

13. Bach, P., & Hayes, S. C. (2002). The use of acceptance and commitment therapy to prevent the rehospitalization of psychotic patients: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(5), 1129-1139. doi: 10.1037//0022-006X.70.5.1129.

This study looked at how ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) teaches patients about how to deal with stressful, unavoidable events.

14. Boulanger, J. L., Hayes, S. C., & Lillis, J. (2009). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In G. L. Fisher & N. A. Roget (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, & Recovery (Vol. 1, pp. 4-7). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3074600014&v=2.1&u=nclivedc&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=7bbca543dd5a0bbe58b0a22f5991b9e1.

This is a description of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and it's six core processes. These create psychological flexibility.

15. Bonanno, G. A., Papa, A., Lalande, K., Westphal, M., & Coifman, K. (2004). The importance of being flexible: the ability to both enhance and suppress emotional expression predicts long-term adjustment.Psychological Science, 15(7), 482-487.

The experimenters argued that it is the ability to enhance or suppress emotional expression that leads to good adaptation of stressful situations. They called this flexibility, and analyzed NYC college students' emotional suppression and expression to find whether or not flexibility led to better adjustment. Taylor Haynes (talk) 01:24, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * References look good, not clear how you are going to organize the page. Definitely want sub-headings to highlight different aspects of the personality trait and/or the type of research support.  Perhaps the Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Clinical Psychology Review, chapter has a useful structure.
 * Organization: remember that people hop around in reading Wikipedia articles, so make each little section as independent as you can
 * Methods: what kind of research supports these theories?  Some sections will need more method details than others, helpful to keep in mind these descriptions: 3 research methods (experiments vs correlation vs descriptive); 2 data-collection (self-report vs observation); 2 research settings (lab vs field)
 * Figures and tables: be thoughtful.  Wikicommons has lots of pictures that might be useful.  You cannot copy directly from journal articles (copyright violation), but you can recreate a figure and then donate it yourself. Greta Munger (talk) 14:05, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

To butt in here, i just noticed that we already have cognitive flexibility which is a well developed article and looks to at least overlap this article.--Penbat (talk) 14:22, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

I think you have strong references and a good basis on which to start writing your article. However, that may be easier for you to do if you have a clear way to organize all your articles. There will first need to be a strong definition of flexibility in the beginning and how it relates to psychology / personality. You may also consider briefly mentioning different types of flexibility (cognitive flexibility, etc) and creating links to the existing wikipedia articles. I went through your reviews of your listed sources and brainstormed a couple of potential sub-headings for you. Consider having headings like “flexibility and relationships” (article 3), flexibility and cognitive disorders / health (articles 2 and 11 you can create sub-sub sections for each different cognitive disorder that may come out of ‘abnormal’ flexibility whatever that may be), neurological basis of flexibility (article 5), methodology for studying flexibility (articles 10 and 12 --- keeping in mind what Dr. Munger commented about methodology), and then the acceptance and commitment therapy (articles 8, 13, 14). I didn't put the sub-headings in any particular order --- just do it in whatever way makes most sense for you. Maybe, too, think about a “practical implications” subheading. I am currently taking I/O psychology and we talk a lot about how personality can affect success (or lack of) in the workplace. We have not talked specifically about flexibility but I’m sure there will be some links there for you to explore. How does having a flexible personality correlate to success in the workplace, school, etc. Also, are there specific cognitive tests or assessments that are used to measure flexibility? What could those be? You could have a sub-section on each one. Once you have the subtopics you can also find some other articles that relate to those topics to expand upon them. Also, not sure if you’ve seen yet but the wiki user “penbat” commented that the cognitive flexibility article overlaps with yours. You may want to take a look at that and see the ways they have organized their information into subtopics. It could help you organize your own thoughts. Margaret Cookson (talk) 21:31, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry to interfere with this assignment but there are fundamental questions to be asked. It looks to me like flexibility (personality) was created by somebody who didn't realise that cognitive flexibility already existed. There is no point in doing this assignment just for the sake of it. Cognitive flexibility is of a high standard (good article status) and was part of an educational assignment. Before doing work on flexibility (personality) there needs to be an assessment as to whether flexibility (personality) needs to exist at all. If there is ground not covered by cognitive flexibility the answer may be to diversify it as a single article rather than have two articles but this may not be a good use of a students time working on an article that is already of a high standard. One poorly developed article that your group might like to look at at some point is attention seeking.--Penbat (talk) 08:12, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * My next step is going to be taking a close look at the proposed references and seeing whether they really do fit with the existing Cognitive flexibility page. My first read was that they were really quite different, but I will take a closer look. Greta Munger (talk) 12:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Just finished the comparison, and all 15 of the proposed articles are not part of the Cognitive flexibility page, so this is new information Taylor would like to add. I would not recommend a new sub-section "personality" on the cognitive flexibility page because the questions being asked when you look at personality traits (implications for health, particularly various mental health connections) are quite different from what a cognitive researcher looks at (implicated for problem solving). The topics (personality vs cognitive psychology) are taught as separate courses after Psy 101.  Penbat, what's the next best step? Greta Munger (talk) 12:51, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * OK it does look as if this article is justified if you are sure that there is a clear functional distinction between cognitive and personality flexibility. I do however notice that 4 of the 15 above refs explicitly mention "cognitive flexibility" and must surely belong to the cognitive flexibility article and not here. There may be other refs out of the 15 that are more appropriate in cognitive flexibility as well. Cognitive flexibility is a separate task. I suggest that they are just listed on talk:cognitive flexibility for somebody to review whether there is any point in adding material from those refs to cognitive flexibility.
 * So there is no point in duplicating info in both articles but it may be a good idea to have a section in each of the 2 articles summarizing the other article in a paragraph or two (typically the introductory text of the other article is used). You use under the section heading to make an explicit link to the other article eg  . Otherwise the existence of the other article could be made just using a "See also" link.
 * --Penbat (talk) 14:48, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed, personality and cognitive are studied quite differently, but I agree that connecting the articles with summaries sounds like a very good plan. The one I see that might be a better fit for the cognitive flexibility  is Barbey, A. K., Colom, R., & Grafman, J. (2013). Architecture of cognitive flexibility revealed by lesion mapping. Neuroimage, 82547-554. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.087.  The rest (looking at emotion, coping, various mental disorders) are best for an article about personality.  I will make sure Taylor thinks this all through.  The final edits (just meaning, what I will grade) are not due until May 12, so there might not be much action for a couple of weeks.  Thanks so much for the help. Greta Munger (talk) 14:03, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
 * An alternative to my summary section idea is to have a section explaining how personality flexibility and cognitive flexibility interact/interface with each other which would include a link to cognitive flexibility.--Penbat (talk) 16:59, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

CBT Example
In the article it gives a CBT example: "This is in contrast to a cognitive therapy approach where the person might challenge the thought by thinking of things in which he or she excels." Actually, in the CBT approach, wouldn't you look for cognitive distortions first, and then challenge the thought? So in CBT you would recognize the error of labeling, all or nothing thinking, etc too. That would then help as you look for evidence to dispute a thought that you've established is distorted. Perhaps it would be helpful to clarify this statement in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johngraybosch (talk • contribs) 19:33, 10 June 2019 (UTC)