AAQ-II Flexibility Tracker
The Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II)
About this measure
Show ▾The AAQ-II is the most widely used self-report measure of psychological flexibility — the ability to stay open to difficult thoughts and feelings while still acting on what matters. It asks about the opposite pattern too: psychological inflexibility, or experiential avoidance, where painful internal experiences end up steering behavior more than one's own values do.
It's a short, 7-item scale. Each item is rated from 1 ("never true") to 7 ("always true"), and the 7 ratings are added together for a total between 7 and 49. Higher totals reflect more psychological inflexibility; lower totals reflect more flexibility. There's no "perfect" score to chase — it's meant to be tracked over time as a way of noticing change, not as a one-time verdict.
Steven C. Hayes and colleagues, who developed the AAQ-II, note that movement on this measure can happen over a few weeks for some people and take a few months for others, and that a meaningful shift for one person may look different for another.
Current psychometric properties
Show ▾The AAQ-II was developed as a refinement of the original AAQ (Hayes et al., 2004) to address inconsistent reliability in that earlier version. Bond, Hayes, and colleagues (2011) validated the revised 7-item scale across 2,816 participants in six samples, including university students, outpatient treatment-seekers, and working adults.
- Internal consistency: mean Cronbach's alpha of .84, ranging from .78 to .88 across samples.
- Test-retest reliability: .81 at 3 months and .79 at 12 months.
- Convergent validity: correlates highly (r = .97) with the original AAQ, with more consistent psychometric behavior.
- Predictive validity: AAQ-II scores have been shown to predict a range of outcomes over time, including mental health symptoms and workplace absence.
- Reference range: in the validation research and subsequent normative work, total scores in roughly the 24–28 range have been associated with clinically elevated levels of distress (e.g., anxiety, depression). This is a general reference point drawn from group research, not an individual diagnostic cutoff.
Bond, F. W., Hayes, S. C., Baer, R. A., Carpenter, K. M., Guenole, N., Orcutt, H. K., Waltz, T., & Zettle, R. D. (2011). Preliminary psychometric properties of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire – II: A revised measure of psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance. Behavior Therapy, 42, 676–688.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., Wilson, K. G., Bissett, R. T., Pistorello, J., Toarmino, D., Polusny, M. A., Dykstra, T. A., Batten, S. V., Bergan, J., Stewart, S. H., Zvolensky, M. J., Eifert, G. H., Bond, F. W., Forsyth, J. P., Karekla, M., & McCurry, S. M. (2004). Measuring experiential avoidance: A preliminary test of a working model. The Psychological Record, 54, 553–578.
1 never true |
2 very seldom true |
3 seldom true |
4 sometimes true |
5 frequently true |
6 almost always true |
7 always true |