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Rumination is linked to cognitive inflexibility yet unrelated to affective inflexibility

Black et al. (2026) found that all three rumination subtypes were significantly predicted by self-reported cognitive inflexibility on the DFlex, yet showed no significant relationship with task-based affective flexibility as measured by MAFT switch accuracy or RT. The authors interpret this dissociation as evidence that cognitive and affective flexibility, while conceptually related, likely represent distinct psychological constructs operating through different mechanisms, though they acknowledge the alternative explanation that the rumination-DFlex association may partly reflect shared method variance across self-report measures. From this they conclude that rumination in misophonia is more tightly coupled to trait-level cognitive rigidity than to moment-to-moment affective switching ability, and call for multi-method designs to clarify whether the dissociation is substantive (Black et al., 2026).