Dear Association of Contextual Behavioral Science,
Being the recipient of the developing world scholarship of the 2013 Sydney world conference for contextual behavioral science, I hereby express my gratitude for this wonderful opportunity to learn, discuss, and share insights in the theory and practice of this burgeoning field. In the following, I will be happily present what we have accomplished in terms of the empirical researches of psychological flexibility carried out by myself and our team after the conference.
In Chinese, we submitted two papers on the validations of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire 2nd Edition as well as the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire, both validation papers (entitled “Reliability and validity in a Chinese version of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire – 2nd Edition (AAQ-II) in college students” and “Reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire”) have been accepted by the Chinese Mental Health Journal, and will be appeared in the upcoming printed journal soon. Together with the two earlier review papers on ACT and RFT, these papers would lay down the conceptual foundation for further theoretical and interventional researches in China.
Following the validation papers, we have further analyzed the associations between psychological flexibility measures (PS) and generalized psychological well-being scales. This included the relationships of PS with differential psychological symptoms (SCL-90-R) among college students, together with post traumatic stress (PCL-C) and post traumatic growth (PTGI) among college student earlier influenced by the Wenchuan Earthquake. Our results showed that PS is a good predictor for psychological well-being, and these two papers have both submitted for review (entitled “Psychological flexibility model in predicting post-traumatic stresses and growth” and “Psychological flexibility as a predictor for levels of psychological distress and gender differences in its predictability among college students”).
I personally have completed a paper on the reliability, construct and incremental validity of the AAQ-II questionnaire in English. The paper after slight amendments will be submitted to the Journal of Behavioral Therapy, following Dr. Frank Bond’s original paper on the development of the AAQ-II questionnaire. The paper has been read by Professor Steven Hayes, and he considered the incremental validity studies were important conceptually, and encouraged us to take part in longitudinal studies for the predictive roles of psychological flexibility in future.
Moreover, we have completed a study among 40 college students on the associations between psychological flexibility and cognitive flexibility based on a computerized modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, our preliminary results suggested that cognitive flexibility are not as context specific, thus were more associated with the concept of present moment awareness. This study will be prepared into a manuscript in the near future.
Unfortunately, our paper on a microblogged suicide case “Zou-Fan” was not accepted into the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science due to its qualitative nature. We consider the paper not as a rigorous empirical research but a mixed policy article. Although the paper may not be readily accepted as agreed by most of our team, we believe that this endeavor in assessing a real life case would shed many insights to the new field of data mining and computer aided assistance, which is going to be more and more based on a pragmatic contextual philosophy.
These are the little “milestones” we have accomplished after last year’s world conference on contextual behavioral science. I hoped that we can produce more empirical researches of contextual behavioral science. Again, thank you for providing me the precious opportunity to come to UNSW in Sydney, and we wish the ACBS to have an ever more fruitful year in 2014.
Yours sincerely,
Yang Ji
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