The Psychological Cost of Rigidity: Exploring the Mediation of Psychological Inflexibility Between Personality and Prefrontal Functioning
Daniela Batallas et al.
What the paper says
Young individuals often experience executive functioning challenges, such as attentional lapses, impulsivity, and poor self-regulation, which may indicate underlying prefrontal dysfunction and contribute to stress and emotional dysregulation. Research suggests that specific personality traits, particularly harm avoidance and self-directedness, are closely related to these executive difficulties. Harm avoidance refers to a temperament trait characterized by excessive worry, fear, and avoidance of uncertainty, whereas self-directedness reflects a character trait involving goal orientation, self-control, and responsibility. However, the mechanisms linking these traits to executive functioning remain insufficiently understood. Psychological inflexibility, defined as a rigid and avoidance-based response to internal distress, has been proposed as a transdiagnostic process that may explain this link. This study investigates the mediating role of psychological inflexibility in the link between harm avoidance and self-directedness with prefrontal dysfunction in 501 young adults (56.69% male, M = 21.00 years, SD = 2.62). Participants completed self-report measures on personality traits, psychological inflexibility and prefrontal symptomatology. Mediation analyses using PROCESS Macro (model 4) showed that harm avoidance positively predicted psychological inflexibility (path a1: β = 0.50, p < .001), which in turn predicted greater prefrontal symptomatology (path b1: β = 0.45, p < .001). Conversely, self-directedness negatively predicted psychological inflexibility (path a2: β = -0.54, p < .001), which was associated with lower prefrontal symptomatology (path b2: β = 0.40, p < .001). Indirect effects were significant for both harm avoidance (β = 0.23, 95% CI [0.17, 0.29]) and self-directedness (β = -0.21, 95% CI [-0.27, -0.16]), indicating partial mediation. Overall, these findings highlight that psychological inflexibility serves as a key mechanism linking personality dispositions to executive and emotional self-regulation in young adults. Interventions aimed at increasing psychological flexibility may enhance adaptive functioning and resilience during this developmental period.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.