Many people know the feeling of being stuck in a loop of worrying thoughts and treating them as fact. Therapists call it cognitive fusion, and it is a target in several modern talking therapies. Until now, Malay speakers have lacked a checked tool to measure it, and a new study suggests a translated version works well among university students.

Researchers at Universiti Malaysia Sabah and partner institutions translated and tested the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire, a seven-item measure, into Malay. The findings appear in The Open Psychology Journal. The work was a cross-sectional validation study of 220 university students.

Translation followed a forward and backward process, with six groups of postgraduate students working independently before a meeting to agree the wording. A pilot with 30 students checked that the items were clear and suited the culture. The main survey ran online from June to July 2025, using convenience sampling.

Cognitive fusion is the tendency to become entangled with thoughts and treat them as literal truths, while psychological inflexibility is a rigid style of coping under distress. Measurement invariance means a questionnaire works in the same way across groups, here men and women.

The average age was 23, 79.1 per cent were women and 75 per cent were studying for a bachelor’s degree. The Malay version showed excellent internal consistency, with reliability scores of about 0.94. Statistical testing supported a single underlying factor, with item loadings from 0.80 to 0.90. Education levels ran from high school to doctorate, though most were undergraduates.

Scores matched what theory predicts, and were strongly linked to psychological inflexibility, with a correlation of 0.79, and moderately to strongly linked to depression, anxiety and stress, with correlations of 0.57 to 0.69. All of these links were statistically significant. The questionnaire also worked in a similar way for men and women.

One fit measure was less tidy. A statistic called RMSEA came out at 0.102, higher than usually preferred. The authors say this figure can be inflated in short questionnaires with few items, and they relied mainly on other fit measures that looked strong.

A validated Malay version could help researchers and clinicians study how thought patterns relate to mental health in Malaysia. The study has clear limits. The sample was mostly young, highly educated women, and only 46 were men, which may weaken the gender comparison. The team did not test whether scores stay stable over time, nor how well the tool tells cognitive fusion apart from related ideas or predicts later outcomes.

Versions of this questionnaire already exist in other languages and have shown similar results. The Malay version matches that pattern, and links to distress in line with earlier work. It adds a usable tool for Malay speakers, though more testing in clinical and community groups is still needed.