The Relationship Between Teachers' Psychological Flexibility and Their Perceptions of Student Behavior

Understanding how teachers perceive student behavior and how those perceptions impact their ability to intervene effectively on challenging behaviors is relatively new approach to conceptualizing improvements to behavioral interventions. Before developing interventions, it is important to investigate the links between teacher perceptions and their flexibility in responding to those perceptions. Expanding on and connecting existing research from Relational Frame Theory, Relational Density Theory, Acceptance and Commitment Training, Education, and Psychology, this exploratory study investigates the links between teachers’ perceptions of student behavior and their levels of psychological flexibility and inflexibility. Responses to the 24-item MPFI and a 78 word-pairs relational task were collected from teachers across the country resulting in a final sample of n=192. Responses were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), network analysis, and multidimensional scaling (MDS). Using EFA, 5 subscales emerged from the relational task results. Network analyses revealed a unique relationship between higher scores in the UFM construct of defensively reacting (Rogge & Daks, 2021) and higher scores on the relational task subscales of negative adjective pairing and positive adjective pairing. Because defensively reacting is a composite of 3 dimensions of PI (experiential avoidance, self-as-content, and fusion), these relationships offered partial support of my hypothesis that teachers with a higher level of PI would perceive students in a somewhat rigid way (i.e. students who are angry are also defiant, disrespectful, and unsuccessful whereas students who are quiet are also cooperative, thoughtful, and successful). Thus, the current results clarified that, in the context of the UFM, the teachers whose immediate response to a difficult or challenging situation (inside or outside of the classroom) was to become defensive and reactive also tended to use overly simplified strategies for perceiving students as either categorically good or bad (with little nuance). Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.