It’s great that you actually looked at the paper and you inspired me to do the same. But could you please explain why you think the correlations seem “really really small”? To me they actually seem surprisingly high. Some examples: 0.25 for safetyism, -0.47 for resilience, 0.45 for loneliness. Especially the latter two are almost shockingly high given what we see elsewhere in psychology. You can’t expect one multi-faceted construct like social cognitive distortions to fully or almost fully explain some other complex and multifaceted construct like safetyism. If the correlation was super high, that would just mean that we’re likely using two different names for the same thing. Plus it’s not just a single correlation that supports the hypothesis in this paper but the whole pattern of correlations is consistent with it as far as I can tell as a non-expert. I haven’t read the paper closely, and the conclusions may very well be entirely wrong, but I wouldn’t conclude that based on the correlations.