Our primary objective was to examine the impact of acquiescent responding on empathy measures. We selected the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) as the measure for this case study due to its composition--the affective dissonance scale consists solely of items that are semantically reversed relative to the empathy construct, while…

In the past 40 years, accumulating evidence suggested that autistic individuals are at an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This study examined the occurrence of various potential risk factors for lifetime suicidal behavior and suicidal thoughts in the past month in a Dutch cohort (Netherlands Autism Register) of autistic…

Several measures have been developed to assess loneliness in the general population. Here, we examined if, and how accurately, widely-used measures capture the experience of loneliness in autistic adults. A total of 203 autistic participants from the UK completed an online survey, which included two widely-used loneliness questionnaires: the…

Purpose: The present study aimed to examine the mediation role of loneliness in the relationship between perceived social support and depressive symptoms among university students in Portugal. The study also investigated the moderation role of age on the mediation model. Design/methodology/approach: Survey data sample consisted of 755 participants…

Barriers to healthcare experienced by Australian autistic adults have not been previously explored. We conducted a cross-sectional investigation of barriers to healthcare and associated factors from a subtle realism perspective. Perceived barriers to healthcare were obtained from the Barriers to Healthcare Checklist Short-Form (BHC). A total of…

Objective: The Scale of Emotional Development--Short (SED-S) is an instrument to assess the level of emotional development (ED) in people with intellectual and developmental disability. Index cases are developed as a didactic tool to standardize the application of the scale. Method: In a stepwise process, a European working group from six…

The factor structure, measurement invariance, and external validity of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-short (CERQ-short) specific to the COVID-19 pandemic was examined using data from 3,788 adult Filipinos. The nine-factor CERQ-short was confirmed and was tested invariant across gender and age groups. The CERQ factors correlate…

Co-occurring problems with mood and anxiety among adolescents and adults on the autism spectrum are highly prevalent and contribute to poor outcomes and diminished quality of life. The current study's principal aim was to evaluate variation in the presentation of depression symptomatology among adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder,…

We administered the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) to 101 adults receiving HIV treatment. Exploratory factor analysis yielded a single anxiety factor that accounted for 68.7% of the variance in the data. A single score may be used to indicate the overall level of anxiety of individuals receiving HIV treatment in South Africa.

The "Profile of Mood States 2nd Edition" (POMS 2) was published in 2012 by Multi-Health Systems (MHS) to assess transient feelings and mood among individuals aged 13 years and above. Evolving from the original POMS (McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1971, 1992), the POMS 2 was designed for youth (13-17 years old) and adults (18 years old…

This study examined the effects of a 20-week intervention to foster affective involvement during interaction and communication between an adult with congenital deafblindness (CDB) and his caregivers in a group home and a daytime activities center. Using a single-subject design, we examined whether the intervention increased affective involvement…

The article provides an overview of goodness-of-fit assessment methods for item response theory (IRT) models. It is now possible to obtain accurate "p"-values of the overall fit of the model if bivariate information statistics are used. Several alternative approaches are described. As the validity of inferences drawn on the fitted model…

Scales measuring people's perceptions of themselves as origins (determining their own behavior) or pawns (their behavior being determined by forces beyond their control) were devised using content analysis of verbalizations. Data were obtained from 528 people, experiencing one of nine life situations. Pawn and origin perception differed across…

The purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's understanding of emotions between the ages of 4 and 12. Twenty-four children at each of five age groups (4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), equally divided by sex, served as subjects. Three groups of tasks were administered: (1) the recognition of facial expressions from photographs, (2) the…

In samples of 1,005 adolescents and adults in Hong Kong and 281 adolescents and adults in London (England), Moral Development Test patterns conform to that predicted by L. Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development (1969), but the degree of association between the stages differed between cultures. (SLD)