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Despite the established need for sexuality and relationship programming for autistic adults, there are extremely limited curricula for this population. This pilot study used an evidence-based sexuality and relationship education program for autistic adolescents (Tackling Teenage Training) as the basis for an adult-focused virtual psychoeducational group. Qualitative feedback, quantitative ratings of the programming, and behavioral surveys from participants were collected. Nine participants completed the program, and corresponding pre and post measures. Highly rated topics, for example gender identity and online dating, were consistent with previous research on what autistic adults want from a sexuality and relationship education program. Future programming should incorporate increased attention to themes and topics highlighted by participants, and should utilize the teaching tools (e.g., role play, peer discussions) identified as useful by the participants., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Objective(s): Yearning, a hallmark of grief disorders, relates to rumination and potentially to cognitive avoidance. We developed an 8-item short form of the only existing validated yearning measure, the Yearning in Situations of Loss Scale (YSL), to improve its validity and administration ease., Method: Cross-sectional surveys were conducted among bereaved Dutch (N = 313) and German (N = 235) community samples and an American treatment-seeking sample (N = 95). All samples completed the YSL, and community samples additionally measures of rumination, loss-related avoidance, complicated grief (CG), and depression., Results: A one-factor model provided a good fit to the YSL Short Form (YSL-SF) in the community samples. A two-factor structure (cognitive and emotional yearning)best fitted the YSL-SF in the treatment-seeking sample. YSL-SF scores correlated positively with rumination, loss-related avoidance, and with CG symptoms whilst controlling for rumination and loss-related avoidance., Conclusion: The YSL-SF appears an easy-to-administer and valid measure of yearning after bereavement., (© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Clinical Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Sharing specific autobiographical events is likely to influence the support people give us; a person who shares little detail of their lives may be unlikely to attract social support and this may in turn contribute towards anxious and depressive symptoms. Participants ( N  = 142) reported memories evoked by negative and positive cue words and these memories were coded for whether or not they referred to a specific event lasting less than 24 h. At this time (T1) and one year later (T2), participants also completed the UCLA Life Stress Interview (LSI), which includes a measure of social support, and measures of depression and anxiety comprising a general distress latent construct. The tendency to recall fewer specific memories was associated with lower social support given by friends and romantic partners and this was in turn associated with elevated general distress at T2, even when accounting for T1 social support and general distress. Our findings contribute to the literature regarding the social function of memory and suggest another route via which reduced specificity contributes to emotional disorders.

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) has been central in psychopathological studies of memory dysfunctions, as reduced memory specificity or overgeneralised autobiographical memory has been recognised as a hallmark vulnerability for depression. In the AMT, participants are asked to generate specific memories in response to emotional cue words, and their responses are scored by human experts. Because the manual coding takes some time, particularly when analysing a large dataset, recent studies have proposed computerised scoring algorithms. These algorithms have been shown to reliably discriminate between specific and non-specific memories of English-speaking children and Dutch- and Japanese-speaking adults. The key limitation is that the algorithm is not developed for English-speaking adult memories, which may cover a wider range of vocabulary that the existing algorithm for English-speaking child memories cannot process correctly. In the present study, we trained a new support vector machine to score memories of English-speaking adults. In a performance test (predicting memory specificity against human expert coding), the adult-memory algorithm outperformed the child-memory variant. In another independent performance test, the adult-memory algorithm showed robust performances to score memories that were generated in response to a different set of cues. These results suggest that the adult-memory algorithm reliably scores memory specificity.

The Ten-Item Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT-10) is a short screening instrument developed to assess Internet gaming disorder (IGD) as proposed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , fifth edition ( DSM-5 ), adopting a concise, clear, and consistent item-wording. According to initial studies conducted in 2014, the instrument showed promising psychometric characteristics. The present study tested the psychometric properties, including language and gender invariance, in a large international sample of online gamers. In this study, data were collected from 7,193 participants comprising Hungarian ( n = 3,924), Iranian ( n = 791), English-speaking ( n = 754), French-speaking ( n = 421), Norwegian ( n = 195), Czech ( n = 496), and Peruvian ( n = 612) online gamers via gaming-related websites and gaming-related social-networking-site groups. A unidimensional factor structure provided a good fit to the data in all language-based samples. In addition, results indicated both language and gender invariance on the level of scalar invariance. Criterion and construct validity of the IGDT-10 was supported by its strong association with the Problematic Online Gaming Questionnaire and moderate association with weekly gaming time, psychopathological symptoms, and impulsivity. The proportions of each sample that met the cut-off score on the IGDT-10 varied between 1.61% and 4.48% in the individual samples, except for the Peruvian sample (13.44%). The IGDT-10 shows robust psychometric properties and appears suitable for conducting cross-cultural and gender comparisons across seven languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).