(PS7-A23) Sexual Orientation Beliefs, Psychological Inflexibility, and Mental Health Among Sexual Minorities

Sexual orientation beliefs are ontological and etiological beliefs people have regarding sexual orientation. Given core beliefs about the self and others are key to psychological outcomes, in the present study, we sought to test if sexual orientation beliefs among sexual minorities were related to a wide variety of psychosocial stressors and mental health outcomes.We recruited a sample of sexual minority participants (n = 400) from Prolific–Academic (ProA) who completed measures assessing sexual orientation beliefs (SOBS; Arseneau et al., 2013), proximal minority stressors (internalized homonegativity), distal minority stressors (hometown climate, bi+ visibility attempts, heterosexist harassment, discrimination, microaggressions, and exposure to hate crimes), and psychological, mental health outcomes (psychological inflexibility, depression, drug use, suicidal ideation, and post-traumatic stress symptoms). We conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) on the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale. The LPA resulted in a two-profile solution wherein certain participants solely endorsed high levels of beliefs in the innate qualities of sexual orientation (naturalness-only profile) or endorsed high levels of essentialist beliefs across domains including homogeneity, discreteness, informativeness, and naturalness-beliefs (i.e., multidimensional essentialism profile). Those recalling less affirming hometown climates were more likely to endorse the multidimensional profile than the naturalness-only profile. Those endorsing the multidimensional essentialism profile were also more likely to experience higher levels of depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and psychological inflexibility than those endorsing the naturalness-only profile.  These results suggest that sexual orientation beliefs are a key set of core beliefs about the self and others for sexual minorities. Likewise, these results suggest that broader endorsement of essentialist beliefs constrains psychological flexibility for sexual minorities.  These findings suggest that sexual orientation beliefs may be important to tailoring CBT and ACT for sexual minority populations.