Psychological flexibility as a predictor of work engagement and symptom severity in personnel with chronic fatigue syndrome, 2025, Surendran

Dolphin

Dolphin

Senior Member (Voting Rights)

Research Article

Psychological flexibility as a predictor of work engagement and symptom severity in personnel with chronic fatigue syndrome​

Gopika Surendran
&
Tony P. Jose
Received 03 Apr 2025, Accepted 07 Jul 2025, Published online: 22 Jul 2025




ABSTRACT​

Objective​

This study examines the predictive role of Psychological Flexibility in symptom severity and work engagement among professionals with chronic fatigue syndrome and explores differences across sex and age groups.

Methods​

A study was conducted with 126 participants with validated self-report measures assessing psychological flexibility, symptom severity, and work engagement. Non-parametric analyses examined correlations and group differences.

Results​

Psychological flexibility demonstrated a significant negative correlation with symptom severity and a strong positive correlation with work engagement. There were no significant sex- or age-based differences in psychological flexibility, Symptom Severity, or Work Engagement. However, Symptom Severity significantly influenced both psychological flexibility and Work Engagement. Ordinal logistic regression confirmed that higher psychological flexibility predicted lower Symptom Severity and greater Work Engagement.

Conclusion​

The findings highlight the potentially important role of psychological flexibility in mitigating symptom severity and enhancing work engagement among individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome. Interventions aimed at improving psychological flexibility may serve as effective strategies for symptom management and workplace adaptation, ultimately contributing to better functional outcomes.
KEYWORDS:


Acknowledgements​

We should thank all the participants for their participation in this study.

Author contributions​

Gopika Surendran: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Investigation, Resources, Analysis and Writing of original draft.

Dr. Tony P Jose: Editing and Supervision.

Disclosure statement​

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declarations​

Ethics statement​

This research was authorized by the institutional review board of the Vellore Institute of Technology and complies with the principles of the Helsinki Declaration. Each participant provided informed consent.

Data availability statement​

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information​

Notes on contributors​

Gopika Surendran​

Gopika Surendran Ph.D. Research scholar, Department of Social Science, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, 632014

Tony P. Jose​

Tony P Jose Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore- 632014.
 
You could find a very large number of correlations between things in these patients. It's not worth publishing a paper just to say that you've found some correlation and then speculating that one of these things is causing the other and a potential treatment target.

Psychological flexibility would include being aware of how one feels and that might help with pacing, but pacing doesn't appear to lead to significant improvements in work capacity or disability.

I suspect that this is another case of consequences of the illness on things found in psychological flexibility questionnaires being confused with character. A patient with more severe illness would be less open to new experiences (having an illness makes people more risk averse and avoidant of places and experiences that might exacerbate their symptoms). But that doesn't mean that trying to persuade the patient to be open to new experiences will lead to a reduction in symptoms.
 
Last edited:
It's sad that someone would waste their time and energy on this. At best they're slowly discovering what patients have been saying all along about the importance of accepting one's limitations and pacing, at worst they're trying to prove the same old prejudices true and spreading misleading ideas.

The prejudice being that patients are disabled because of a bad attitude.
 
The constant stream of papers like this and people getting PhD's on the basis of this sort of 'research' is criminally negligent in my view. The supervisors should know that correlation does not equal causation, so should the students. And the whole practice of getting sick people to fill in endless psychological questionnaires and then using their false interpretation of the results to attack us is sick.

I hope the authors of this paper will find this thread and read these comments. And then go away and have a good hard think about what they are doing to sick people.

I cannot forget the correspondence I had with another PhD student who was doing a similar cheap and easy process with off the shelf questionnaires not designed for this purpose, or badly designed, and getting a doctorate on the strength of it. He freely admitted that he had no interest in ME/CFS or in finding out anything useful that will help pwME, he just needed an easy source of data to analyse for his thesis.
 
The findings highlight the potentially important role of psychological flexibility in mitigating symptom severity and enhancing work engagement among individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome.​

It does no such thing. You have not established causation.
 
The paper said:
Ordinal logistic regression confirmed that higher psychological flexibility predicted lower Symptom Severity and greater Work Engagement.
Click to expand...
How does nonsense that wouldn't even get a passing grade in an intro class get published like it's a real academic paper? This entire discipline is basically like oppositional defiance to Occam's razor: I won't even consider the most likely, and the only reasonable, explanation, here's a completely laughable alternative explanation that literally takes the consequence of the cause and attributes it as the cause.

Even religion generally tries to make more sense than this. They seem to have created the most clueless people in history out of it. Even the image of people chasing smoke using nets out of certainty that it will extinguish the fire barely captures how absurd what they are doing here. It's pants-on-head ridiculous, as if they are intentionally producing work that violate every single rule about statistics. This will eventually serve as teaching material, no doubt about it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom