Spanish validation of the short-form of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire (AFQ-Y8) with children and adolescents.
Abstract
The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth-Short Form (AFQ-Y8) was designed to measure psychological inflexibility in children and adolescents. However, it has not yet been validated to the Spanish population. The present study examines the factorial structure, internal consistency, convergent and incremental validity, and measurement invariance between children and adolescents, male and female, and male and female across age of the AFQ-Y8 with 982 students from Spain (children = 459, adolescents = 523). The results confirmed, in both children and adolescents, a unifactorial structure of general psychological inflexibility. AFQ-Y8 was positively related to negative psychological health outcomes, and negatively related to positive psychological health outcomes and acceptance-related skills, such as mindfulness. In addition, psychological inflexibility showed incremental validity in the explanation of negative psychological health over mindfulness. Measurement invariance across age and gender groups was supported, suggesting that the scores in the AFQ-Y8 are comparable between children and adolescents, and between males and females. In conclusion, results show that the Spanish version of the AFQ-Y8 is a reliable and valid measure of psychological inflexibility in children and adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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The brief version of Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire in Youth (AFQ-Y8) is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance in children and adolescents.
“Recent studies show that AFQ-Y8 is a reliable and valid measure of these elements of psychological inflexibility in children and adolescents [79, 80].”
From Feasibility of group-based acceptance and commitment therapy for adolescents (AHEAD) with multiple functional somatic syndromes: A pilot study (2020) · cites this paper as [79]
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“There is also evidence that general PsyInflex influences negatively Spanish children and adolescents’ psychological well-being (Valdivia-Salas et al., 2017; GarcíaGómez et al., 2019; Mestre et al., 2019; García-Rubio et al., 2020).”
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“Previous studies with children and adolescents that have employed the AFQ-Y17 found similar results in regard to anxiety and depression symptoms [34,38], but to date, no study has considered the potential influence of inflexibility regarding appetitive private events on children’s mental health.”
BackgroundResultCasella, M., Dolce, P., Ponticorvo, M., et al. (2023) · Educational and Psychological Measurement · doi:10.1177/00131644231164363 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“Short-form development is frequent in various fields of psychology, such as Personality Psychology (e.g., Garcı´a-Rubio et al., 2020; Markos & Kokkinos, 2017; Siefert et al., 2020), Clinical Psychology (e.g., Lee et al., 2020; Pietrabissa et al., 2020; Zurlo et al., 2017), and Educational…”
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“The AFQ-Y has been translated into different languages and validated for several populations, such as Portuguese (Cunha & Santos, 2011), Spanish (García-Rubio et al., 2020; Valdivia-Salas et al., 2016), Swedish (Livheim et al., 2016), Italian (Schweiger et al., 2017), Greek (Christodoulou et al., 2018), Colombian (Sal…”
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“…score range 0–32, examples of questions: “My thoughts and feelings mess up my life” and “The bad things I think about myself must be true”) assesses two processes of psychological inflexibility (i.e. experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion) (García-Rubio et al., 2020; Szemenyei et al., 2018).”
de la Maza, S. S., Jiménez, B. M., & Blanco‐Donoso, L. M. (2026) · Behavioral Psychology/Psicología Conductual · doi:10.31083/bp50638 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
“To assess psychological inflexibility, we used the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth (AFQ-Y8), validated in Spanish by García-Rubio et al. (2020).”
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Kallesøe, K. H., Schröder, A., Wicksell, R. K., Preuss, T., Jensen, J. S., & Rask, C. U. (2020) · Figshare · doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.12986608
Kallesøe, K. H., Schröder, A., Wicksell, R. K., Preuss, T., Jensen, J. S., & Rask, C. U. (2020) · Figshare · doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.12986599
Kallesøe, K. H., Schröder, A., Wicksell, R. K., Preuss, T., Jensen, J. S., & Rask, C. U. (2020) · Figshare · doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.12986602
Kallesøe, K. H., Schröder, A., Wicksell, R. K., Preuss, T., Jensen, J. S., & Rask, C. U. (2020) · Figshare · doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.12986605
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- Authors
- García-Rubio, C., Lecuona, O., Blanco Donoso, L. M., Cantero-García, M., Paniagua, D., & Rodríguez-Carvajal, R.
- Affiliations
- Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (ES)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Psychological Assessment
- Published
- 2020-04
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e15-e27
- ISSN
- 1040-3590 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-134X
- OpenAlex
- W2990566373
- Semantic Scholar
- 5b4ba256424f62a2c7b8ebd5a6d799d16e456d0e
- Cited by
- 25
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 5
- FWCI
- 1.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Assessment (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (FPU13/01677)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Keywords
- psychological inflexibility, Spanish validation, children and adolescents, measurement invariance, incremental validity, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy, mental health outcomes, cross-cultural adaptation
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Child, Female, Humans, Male, Personality, Psychometrics, Spain, Reproducibility of Results, Mindfulness
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