Being Flexible in Zuckerman’s Alternative Personality Space

Abstract

Psychological flexibility has attracted significant research interest but surprisingly, investigations about the relationships with personality traits from the biological models of personality have been neglected. The present study therefore aimed to shed more light on the nature of the relationship between psychological flexibility and personality dimensions from Zuckerman’s Alternative Five-Factor Model (AFFM) based on a sample of 398 adults. Psychological flexibility was negatively associated with neuroticism and positively associated with extraversion, aggressiveness, and sensation seeking. Lower neuroticism, higher extraversion, and being a woman significantly predicted approximately 39% of the variance in psychological flexibility. A joint exploratory factor analysis found psychological flexibility located in the neuroticism factor of personality. Findings show that the AFFM can be used as an adequate personality model in explaining the nature of psychological flexibility-inflexibility based on the associations between their sub-processes and lower levels of personality traits. The nature of the relationships between psychological flexibility with both sensation seeking and aggressiveness requires closer investigation.