Cognitive Flexibility Mediates the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Somatization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to examine whether cognitive flexibility mediates the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and somatization in adults. A descriptive correlational design was employed using data from 440 adult participants in the United States. The sample size was determined based on the Morgan and Krejcie table. Participants completed standardized self-report measures including the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (ACE-Q), the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI), and the Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15) for somatization. Data were analyzed using SPSS-27 for descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficients, and AMOS-21 was used for Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the hypothesized mediation model. The results revealed that ACEs were positively correlated with somatization (r = .46, p < .001) and negatively correlated with cognitive flexibility (r = –.39, p < .001). Cognitive flexibility also showed a significant negative correlation with somatization (r = –.41, p < .001). The structural model demonstrated good fit (χ²/df = 2.21, GFI = .96, CFI = .97, RMSEA = .052). SEM results indicated that ACEs significantly predicted somatization both directly (β = .31, p < .001) and indirectly through cognitive flexibility (β = .10, p < .001), with a total effect of β = .41 (p < .001). The mediating role of cognitive flexibility was statistically significant, confirming partial mediation. These findings suggest that cognitive flexibility plays a protective role in the pathway from childhood adversity to physical symptom expression. Interventions aimed at enhancing cognitive flexibility may reduce the severity of somatization among trauma-exposed individuals and contribute to more effective trauma-informed care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".