Todd B. Kashdan and Jonathan Rottenberg (2010), Clinical Psychology Review 30(7):865–878 (first printed in 30(4):467–480) — DOI-10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001
Key takeaways
- Flexibility over strategy. No regulation strategy is good everywhere. Students in New York after 11 September 2001 who could both express and suppress emotion on instruction adjusted better over two years than those good at either alone (Bonanno et al. 2004). Variable copers did better than consistent ones (Cheng 2001). Anger helps in some negotiations and hurts in others.
- Inflexibility runs through psychopathology. Depression shows rumination, rigid attributions, flat emotional reactivity, and lost physiological variability, which Rottenberg calls “emotion context insensitivity”. Anxiety shows experiential avoidance and stereotyped behaviour. Whether inflexibility causes disorder or follows it is open.
- What it rests on. Executive functioning, default mental states (habits, heuristics, change blindness) and personality (neuroticism, positive affect, openness, self-control) make flexibility more or less likely. Measuring it needs repeated, in-situation assessment, not single self-reports.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the review that generalizes
psychological flexibility beyond ACT. The psychopathology-and-treatment
blurb names the construct. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no
instruction for machine-learning practice.
Its place in the line that starts with experiential avoidance:
- The 1996 paper (LIT-551) is cited for the inevitability of negative emotion and for the interpersonal costs of poor executive function. The review keeps experiential avoidance, defined after Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson (1999), as the mark of inflexibility in the anxiety disorders.
- The ACT model (LIT-555) is presented as “extends the concept of ego-resilience”, with its meta-analysis cited as 32 studies and a mean correlation of .42. The review also criticises the AAQ, ACT’s global self-report, as the kind of static measure a dynamic construct cannot be captured by.
No extends relation is declared. The review draws on ACT as one of five
literatures (emotion regulation, mindfulness and acceptance, social and
personality psychology, neuropsychology, ego-resiliency). It could stand
without the 2006 paper, so the relation is stated here in prose instead.
It also bears on two works another agent filed in parallel. It argues against fixed rankings of regulation strategies, “the conventional wisdom in psychology that some regulatory strategies (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) are always better than others (e.g., suppression)”. It cites Gross and John (2003) for that wisdom, not Gross’s 1998 review (LIT-554). As its filing describes it, that review’s definition already makes no assumption that regulation is good or bad, so the target here is the later reappraisal-beats-suppression findings. Its open question about causal direction is the same one Borsboom’s network theory (LIT-547) answers differently, by making disorder a self-sustaining state of the symptoms themselves.