Measuring cognitive fusion through the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire-7: Measurement invariance across non-clinical and clinical psychological samples.

Karl Bang Christensen,Maria Anna Donati,Carmen Berrocal,Olivia Bernini,Costanza Gori,Caterina Primi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246434

Karl Bang Christensen, Maria Anna Donati + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246434

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Feb 3, 2021
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Florence, University of Pisa

Abstract

Cognitive fusion (CF) occurs when people are entangled in their private experiences. Rigid patterns of CF are a risk factor for various forms of psychopathology. The most widely used self-report instrument for assessing CF is the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire–7 (CFQ-7), a unidimensional scale with good reliability and validity. However, its psychometric properties have been studied mainly in non-clinical samples and by applying Classical Test Theory. The goal of this study was to use Item Response Theory to investigate the adequacy of the scale in a non-clinical sample and to test measurement invariance across non-clinical and clinical psychological samples. The non-clinical sample consisted of 258 undergraduate students (68.2% females, Mage = 24.3), while the clinical sample consisted of 105 undergraduate students with psychological distress (60.7% females, Mage = 23.8). The results showed that CFQ-7 assesses a wide range of CF severity among non-clinical subjects and that it is useful to discriminate different levels of CF. Moreover, the results showed the scale was sufficiently informative for a broad range of the trait. The relationships of CFQ-7 scores with theoretically related constructs provided further support to the validity of the scale. The Differential Item Functioning analysis showed that CFQ-7 is invariant across different types of population. Overall, findings in this study provide support for the adequacy of the CFQ-7 both in non-clinical and clinical contexts.

Highlights

Psychological flexibility (PF) has emerged as an important construct to understand mental health and behavioral effectiveness [1,2,3,4]
Univariate distributions of the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire-7 (CFQ-7) items were examined for assessment of normality [62]
All items showed a normal distribution, with skewness values ranging from -.04 to .46 and Skewness, kurtosis, fit statistics, standardized factor loadings, item discrimination, and category threshold estimates of the seven items of the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire-7 (CFQ-7) in the non-clinical sample

Summary

Introduction

Psychological flexibility (PF) has emerged as an important construct to understand mental health and behavioral effectiveness [1,2,3,4]. Cognitive defusion is the ability to distance oneself from one’s thoughts and memories and to continue pursuing personal goals and values regardless of internal events one may be experiencing [2, 5]. CF occurs when behavior is guided more by thoughts and other internal experiences than by the direct experience with the world [2, 5]. Accumulated evidence suggests that these experiential avoidance strategies are ineffective but can increase the frequency of unwanted internal experiences in the long run [7,8,9]

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