Group-based acceptance and commitment therapy to enhance graduate student psychological flexibility: Treatment development and preliminary implementation evaluation.

Objective: Graduate student mental health is a growing concern and the need for interventions is well-documented. This manuscript outlines an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy group treatment for graduate students intended to promote psychological flexibility through the cultivation of six processes: contact with the present moment (mindfulness), freely chosen life direction (values), distance from thoughts (defusion), nonjudgmental acknowledgement of one's internal experiences (acceptance), meta-awareness of one's own experiences (self-as-context), and ongoing patterns of behavior in the service of values (committed action). Participants: The treatment was delivered to graduate students across academic disciplines with variable psychological concerns over several semesters. Method: Graduate students completed measures of preliminary acceptability. Results: Clients perceived the intervention positively and believed they benefited from participating. Conclusion: Treatment evaluation information support the social validity and acceptability of the treatment and justify future studies assessing treatment efficacy and effectiveness.

An experimental study of mindfulness and acceptance-based skills for internalized ageism in older adults and college students.

OBJECTIVES: Older adults (OA; 65+) can become cognitively fused with negative attitudes and stereotypes. Given the verbal nature of ageist stereotypes, mindfulness and acceptance-based practices (MABPs) may help the impact of negative aging attitudes by increasing non-judgmental awareness, cognitive defusion, and acceptance. As part of a larger study, this project examined whether an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) consistent MABP would reduce negative aging attitudes using an experimental design. We hypothesized that assignment to the MABP condition would be associated with lower negative aging attitudes for both OAs and university undergraduates (18-25). METHOD: Both OAs (N = 60) and undergraduate student (N = 60) participants were assigned to the experimental or comparison condition (MABP vs. sit-and-think task) and were then presented negative ageist stereotypes assessed with two ageism measures. RESULTS: Following the MABP, undergraduates who received a MABP had significantly lower ageism scores than did undergraduates who did not, while OAs endorsed higher scores on ageism after receiving the MABP (vs comparison group; ps < .05). There was no significant condition by age sample interaction effect. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that undergraduates and OAs may have different strategies for recontextualizing ageist attitudes, with OAs possibly employing different strategies when confronted with ageism in an experimental context. Overall, aging education, OA experimental research, and evidence-based interventions for negative beliefs about aging are needed. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

Psychological Flexibility and Resilience in Parentally Bereaved College Students.

Losing a parent prior to age 18 years can have life-long implications. The challenges of emerging adulthood may be even more difficult for parentally bereaved college students, and studying their coping responses is crucial for designing campus services and therapy interventions. This study examined the relationships between bereavement-related distress, experiential avoidance (EA), values, and resilience. Findings indicated that EA and low importance of values were correlated with bereavement difficulties, with EA accounting for 26% of the variance in the bereavement distress measure. In addition, reports of behaving consistently with values accounted for 20% of the variance in the resiliency measure. Contrary to hypotheses and previous literature, there were no significant relationships between the measures of EA and values. The results, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

New analyses of the National Institute of Mental Health Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program: do different treatments reflect different processes?

To determine whether or not different therapies have distinct patterns of change, it is useful to investigate not only the end result of psychotherapy (outcome) but also the processes by which outcomes are attained. The present study subjected data from the National Institute of Mental Health Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program to survival analyses to examine whether the process of psychotherapy, as conceptualized by the phase model, differed between psychotherapy treatment approaches. Few differences in terms of progression through phases of psychotherapy were identified between cognitive behavior therapy and interpersonal therapy. Additionally, results indicate that phases of psychotherapy may not represent discrete, sequentially invariant processes.

Repetitive nonsuicidal self-injury as experiential avoidance among a community sample of adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the relationship between experiential avoidance, functionally equivalent behaviors, and repetitive nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI/RNSSI) among adolescents. METHOD: Self-report questionnaires from adolescents (N = 211) from 3 school-based samples were employed to assess three forms of experiential avoidance (thought suppression, alexithymia, and avoidance/cognitive fusion), various aspects of self-mutilating behaviors, and the existence of functionally equivalent behaviors (disordered eating, substance abuse, suicidal ideation/behaviors). RESULTS: Results indicated one third of participants reported a history of NSSI and 16% reported engaging in RNSSI in the past 6 months. Female adolescents were twice as likely as males to report a history of RNSSI. Unwanted inner experiences, thought suppression, and alexithymia differentiated adolescents with a history of NSSI from their counterparts. Functionally equivalent behaviors occurred more frequently among those with a history of NSSI and increased in severity as NSSI increased, particularly suicidal ideation and behaviors. However, results for patterns of avoidance were not as consistent for males as females, which questions the broad application of this model. CONCLUSIONS: NSSI continues to be surprisingly common among adolescents in the community. NSSI, particularly repetitive forms, appears to be strongly related to common forms of experiential avoidance, moreso for female adolescents. Results also illustrate the importance of conceptualizing and treating self-injury as a form of experiential avoidance.