Joseph Ciarrochi a , Baljinder Sahdra a , Sarah Marshall a , Philip Parker a , Caroline Horwath b

1. Accepting, believing, and striving: Identifying the distinctive psychological flexibility profiles of underweight, overweight, and obese people in a large American Sample Joseph Ciarrochia, Baljinder Sahdraa , Sarah Marshalla, Philip Parkera, Caroline Horwathb a University of Western Sydney, Center for Positive Psychology and Education and School of Social Sciences and Psychology b University of Otago, Department of Human Nutrition 

4. Profile analyses • Mean tests: Are there overall differences between BMI groups? • Parallelism: Are their different patterns of results for each weight category? 

5. Low Accepting: Multidimensional experiential avoidance scale (Gamez, et al, 2011) • Behavioral avoidance (I won’t do something if I think it will make me uncomfortable”) • Distress aversion (I would do anything to feel less stressed”) • Distraction and suppression (When something upsetting comes up, I try very hard to stop thinking about it”) • Repression/denial (I am able to turn off my emotions when I don’t want to feel”) • procrastination (I tend to put off unpleasant things that need to get done • Distress endurance (Even when I feel uncomfortable, I don’t give up working toward things I value”).

6. Being emotionally aware (Bagby, et al., 1994) • When I am upset, I don’t know if I am sad, frightened, or angry • It is difficult for me to find the right words for my feelings.

7. Believing/fusing • Hope and self-esteem (Snyder, 2000; Rosenberg, 1965) • Drexel Defusion Scale (Forman et al., 2012). Defusion explained in detail. Meaures the extent people defuse from thoughts about each of ten situations • Cognitive fusion Questionnaire (Gillnnders, et al., 2013). The extent thoughts are distressing, entaingling and interfer with action

8. Striving • Idiographic component followed by a series of likert questions (Emmons and Mcadams, 1991) • Idiographic: …” think of personal strivings as the goals that you typically try to obtain in your life“ • Likert: Controlled and authentic reasons for striving, importance of striving, and extent making progress on striving, and

9. Methods • Planned missing data design • Representative sample • N = 7884; • 3748 males; 4136 females; • Mean age =47.9, SD=16 • Self-reported weight: very high correlation with objective weight (e.g., r > .95) • Multiple imputation data set. Unbiased way of handling missing data

10. Men and Avoidance

11. Women and avoidance

12. Men and believing/defusing

13. Women and believing/defusing

14. Men and emotional awareness

15. Women and Emotional Awareness

16. Men and striving: quantitative

17. Women and striving: quantitative

18. Men and striving: qualitative

19. Women and striving: qualitative

20. Discussion

21. Overweight men and women

22. Underweight men • Defensive but active • High avoidance and high fusion, and extremely low awareness, but also a high willingness to experience distress • Highest belief in ability to achieve goals (hope) but those goals tend to be controlled and focused on self-presentation • Qualitative analysis of strivings indicate low avoidance

23. Underweight women • Low on avoidant strivings, high on self-presentation concern • High hope, average self-esteem • Low emotional awareness • High controlled strivings • Low avoidance strivings, low health/generative strivings, high self-concern strivings

24. Obese men • Procrastination, Avoidant strivings • Lower emotional awareness

25. Obese women • High procrastination, low distress endurance • Low awareness • Low hope and sense of social worth • Low progress on strivings