Creating a Measure of Religious and Spiritual Flexibility
Religion and spirituality are vital aspects of many people’s lives both in the United States and across the globe. Although many constructs and measures exist to describe and assess the experience of pursuing the sacred, the complexity of religious and spiritual experience leads to mixed results in relation to well-being and psychopathological traits. However, in broad terms, the relationship appears positive.
Advice from Steve Hayes on Creating a Successful ACBS Chapter
In September of 2014, Steve Hayes sat down with Brian Thompson of the Oregon Chapter to discuss his thoughts on creating a successful ACBS chapter. This was created for the consumption of the local chapter, but as it may be helpful to others it is being posted here.
Acceptance and commitment therapy as a novel treatment for eating disorders: An initial test of efficacy and mediation
Eating disorders are among the most challenging disorders to treat, with even state-of-the-art cognitive behavioral treatments achieving only modest success rates. One possible reason for the high rate of treatment failures for eating disorders is that existing treatments fail to attend sufficiently to critical aspects of the disorder such as experiential avoidance, poor experiential awareness, and lack of motivation.
Creating a Listserv
ACBS hosts a variety of email listservs which are home to vibrant discussions regarding a range of ACT, RFT, and CBS-related topics. A list of the listservs can be found here.
Most SIGs have their own listservs where members share information relevant to the SIG's focus or topic. If you'd like to create a listserv for your Chapter or SIG, we trecommend you contact an ACBS staff member at acbsstaff @ contextualscience .org or staff @ contextualscience .org.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy for At-Risk Adolescents: A Practitioner’s Guide to Treating Challenging Behavior Problems
Adolescents are more likely than any other age groups to engage in behaviors that contribute to injuries, violence, unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and reckless alcohol, tobacco, and drug use. At-risk adolescents may also exhibit signs of moodiness, aggression, and even self-injury, and these behaviors often cause parents, teachers, and clinicians to become extremely frustrated. Adolescents themselves may even believe that change is impossible.
A pilot study of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as a workshop intervention for body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitudes
This study was a small randomized clinical trial collecting pilot data to assess the effectiveness of a one day Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workshop targeting body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitudes. The treatment was compared to a wait-list control condition. The participants were seventy-three women from a local university and a medium sized city in the Western United States.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for eating disorders: Clinical applications of a group treatment
Eating disorders, particularly among adult patients with a long course of illness, are exceptionally difficult to treat. The few existing empirically supported treatments for adult patients with bulimia nervosa do not lead to symptom remission for a large portion of patients. For adults with anorexia nervosa there are currently no empirically supported treatments.
Baseline eating disorder severity predicts response to an acceptance and commitment therapy-based group treatment
The present study investigated whether more severe baseline eating pathology (e.g. baseline symptomatology, previous hospitalizations, and low weight in anorexia nervosa) moderated the effect of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)-based group treatment. Participants were 140 women who were admitted to an inpatient facility for eating disorders. Women were categorized as anorexia nervosa spectrum or bulimia nervosa spectrum at intake and completed measures of eating pathology.
Psychological flexibility and self-concealment as predictors of disordered eating symptoms
The present cross-sectional study investigated whether self-concealment and psychological flexibility were uniquely associated with different facets of disordered eating (DE; i.e., dieting, bulimia/food preoccupation, and oral control) and whether these associations varied across gender. Participants included 621 female and 212 male college students, ages 18–24 years old.
Contextual Behavioral Science: Creating a science more adequate to the challenge of the human condition
The present article describes the nature, scope, and purpose of Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS). Emerging from behavioral psychology but expanding from those roots, CBS is based on contextual assumptions regarding the centrality of situated action, the nature of epistemology versus ontology, and a pragmatic truth criterion linked to the specific goal of predicting-and-influencing psychological events with precision, scope, and depth.