Malleable Factors in the pursuit of Mental Health and Well-being – Psychological Flexibility and Meaningful Relationships

When wanting to live a mentally healthy life and experience well-being, it is helpful to understand related processes and factors that can be willingly changed. Among those malleable factors are Psychological Flexibility, the ability to react flexibly to changing situations, as well as social relationships, especially those meaningful to us. Both are factors that may be actively influenced through interventions and can contribute to better mental health. Most notably, they are not only important for the general public but for patients suffering from a mental disorder as well. Thus, this thesis examined the following topics: (1) We investigated the influence of two components of Psychological Flexibility - Openness and Engagement - and of anticipatory stress on sleep quality. (2) We tested a newly developed brief and context-sensitive measure of Psychological Flexibility for psychometric properties and for incremental and discriminative validity. (3) We investigated the attributes and functions of meaningful relationships of both clinical and non-clinical samples and how they were associated with well-being and symptoms. Hypotheses were tested using statistical modelling, psychometric and inferential statistics on a diverse range of non-clinical and clinical samples. Results of Manuscript 1 showed that higher Openness and Engagement levels led to better subjective sleep quality the following day for both groups with and without mental disorders. Manuscript 2 confirmed good psychometric properties of the Psy-Flex and showed that it could reliably differentiate between groups with and without mental disorder as well as explain additional variance of the relationship of symptoms and well-being. Finally, Manuscript 3 showed that patients as well as community members have at least one satisfying, high-quality meaningful relationship and that the relationship attributes are associated with their well-being but not with symptoms. Findings indicate that Psychological Flexibility and meaningful relationships are two important sets of malleable factors and processes whose consideration in the development and delivery of psychotherapy as well as in public interventions may increase (public) well-being and mental health.