Measuring Experiential Avoidance in Adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire.

The purpose of the present article is threefold. We intend to review the literature on experiential avoidance since a meta-analysis conducted in 2004 (Hayes et al.) and a review by Kashdan, Barrios, Forsyth, and Steger (2006). As a part of this review, we intend to examine the current "gold standard" measure of experiential avoidance. Finally, a measure of experiential avoidance, valid with children and adolescents, will be presented and validated with an adult sample to address issues of item content and clarity. Experiential avoidance (EA) defines a functional class of behaviors involving excessive negative evaluations of private events (i.e., thoughts, feelings, sensations) and an unwillingness to experience them. EA is evidenced by intentional efforts to control or escape private events and the contexts which occasion them (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette, & Strosahl, 1996). It has been posited as a functional diagnostic category, continuous in nature, demarcated by experiential acceptance and experiential avoidance (Hayes et al, 1996). Not all behaviors serving experientially avoidant functions are pathogenic. Indeed, EA can be an adaptive process. As examples of nonpathogenic avoidance, consider that when people ignore boredom during long work meetings or temporarily avoid conversations with loved ones until the tendency for aggressive reactivity subsides, there are likely no long-term negative consequences. In fact, there are likely positive outcomes in these situations, because such control strategies effectively move us to face discomfort and move us in valued directions. Thus, in such short-term and appropriate contexts, EA can serve as an adaptive form of emotion regulation. Experiential avoidance becomes problematic when a person relies on it rigidly and nearly exclusively, without regard to situational appropriateness. Rather than using an adaptive control strategy, a wife who uses EA to her benefit by controlling her anger or fears before initiating an uncomfortable conversation with her husband, for example, could very well engage in long-term maladaptive avoidant behaviors as well. Rather than approaching her husband with her marital concerns as they arise, she could turn to drinking, initiating fights about unrelated matters, or ignoring her husband. Any of these behaviors, also function to control the aversive thoughts or feelings experienced, and are likely to have poor long-term consequences. The effectiveness of the experientially avoidant behaviors is contextually dependent and related to their effect on what the wife values. Assuming that she cares about having a meaningful, loving, and honest relationship, drinking, fighting, and the silent treatment do not work. These forms of intentional internal regulation--applied rigidly and in the long-term--are unlikely to proffer a meaningful, loving, and honest relationship with her husband. Experiential avoidance used as an inflexible means of regulating private events, restricts the number of available response behaviors (Wilson & Murrell, 2004). Drinking, fighting, and ignoring become "have to" behaviors in response to internal stimuli experienced as unpleasant. In turn these behaviors, by impeding valued directions, lead to an increase in unpleasant external and internal events. These negative events then seemingly require more avoidance. If the wife engages in rigid avoidance strategies like excessive drinking and incitation of arguments, her marital life, as well as other relationships, and her career, would likely deteriorate--creating further aversive situations to avoid. The trap of this type of rule-governed behavior--another process with potential for adaptive and maladaptive uses (see Torneke, Luciano, & Valdivia Salas, 2008)--is clear; following the rule "I have to avoid feeling bad" in conjunction with following the rule, "I have to drink to make the bad go away," quickly becomes a maladaptive cycle. Experiential Avoidance and Its Correlates The implications of maladaptive patterns of experiential avoidance are broad and well documented. …