What are the transdiagnostic components associated with diverse symptoms of psychological distress?

The transdiagnostic approach provides an efficacious and efficient alternative to disorder-based psychological therapies. Emerging evidence suggests that a single main process may maintain psychological distress, but its identity is unclear, and some studies have found additional processes. We included a larger range of process and symptom measures to address these issues. In addition, we used a measure developed from Perceptual Control Theory to test its capacity to describe the findings.

A total of 806 participants completed process measures including worry, rumination, emotion regulation, and experiential avoidance, and symptom measures including anxiety, depression, stress, eating behaviour and body shape concerns, social anxiety, obsessions, compulsions, and alcohol use. Exploratory principal components analysis was used to extract common variance across the process measures.

A total of 660 participants were retained for analysis, 36.4% of whom reported a mental health diagnosis. Three components were extracted, with greater variance explained by the first component, which was comprised of items from measures of recurrent negative thinking, experiential avoidance, and inflexible responding, as well as being highly associated with greater scores on most symptom measures. Component 2 constituted items related to reorganisation, appraisal, action and acceptance, but did not relate to symptoms, while Component 3 constituted items describing ignoring and seeking distraction from problems, less worry, and was mildly associated with greater symptoms.

These three preliminary components set the stage for future, process-focused research.