In female veterans with a history of abuse and sexual trauma, Mindfulness Self Compassion (MSC) training showed positive outcomes in mental health, self-care behaviors, and post-traumatic stress symptom reduction (Braun, 2023). Survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) often employ self-protective survival behaviors, including failure to speak up, rejection of outside relationships, compliance with threats to self or loved ones, and agreement to illegal activity or unwanted sexual relations. In the aftermath of their trauma, survivors of IPV often experience moral injury (i.e., ideation of guilt, shame, and self-directed anger) associated with these behaviors (Salzberger, 2021). We explored the relationship between IPV, moral injury, and participation in a MSC course through a randomized clinical trial of 148 unhoused, trauma- exposed women. Women in the experimental group participated in a 6-week MSC short course, while the control group underwent treatment as usual. Pre- and post-intervention, participants from both groups participated in psychosocial interviews that assessed IPV experiences and moral injury. At baseline, 92.56% reported experiences as IPV and 85.13% reported clinically significant moral injury scores. A Welch's two sample t-test was used to compare the change in moral injury score of IPV survivors in the experimental vs. control group. While the control group expressed a decrease in moral injury (difference score = -14.13, range = [-82, 15]), the experimental group expressed a decrease of greater magnitude (difference score = -19.68, range = [-70, 16]). While the experimental group had slightly greater improvement, the difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.230). Further study is needed to assess MSC intervention as an avenue for improving moral injury among women with experiences of trauma.

Most American adolescents lack access to comprehensive or standardized sex education and instead turn to pornography as their de facto source of sexual learning. Early exposure, sometimes as young as age 11, often includes generative artificial pornography (GAP), which exaggerates gendered bodies and sociosexual scripts. Research suggests GAP shapes maladaptive sexual scripts, priming youth during sensitive developmental periods and contributing to long-term effects such as greater tolerance of violence and gender stereotyping. This study examines how AI-generated sexually suggestive content, when presented as human-created, influences sexual script development and gendered body image standards among emerging adults. Grounded in Simon and Gagnon’s (1986) Sexual Script Theory, the study introduces AI Visual Literacy Skills (AI-VILS) to measure participants’ ability to distinguish AI-generated from human images. Participants (N = 48) completed a four-part protocol: demographic and media-use survey, a 20-trial pairwise comparison task (AvB), a 20-trial realism ranking task (ABC), and a post-task body image reflection. Findings show participants aged 18–21 had significantly lower AI-VILS scores (M = 21.00, SD = 4.35) than those aged 30–33 (M = 36.00, SD = 3.12), suggesting a developmental shift in detection ability. While body dissatisfaction was common, it did not correlate with image filtering behavior. These findings underscore the need to integrate AI/media literacy into sex education to foster healthier sexual development.

Past research has shown that anxiety can be comorbid with schizophrenia, and that anxiety presence is associated with more severe clinical features in people with schizophrenia (Braga et al., 2013). Anxiety and psychosis can both be measured on a spectrum, and most existing research examining the relationship between the two has focused on the clinical end of these spectrums. However, less research has examined the relationship between anxiety and psychosis symptoms in subclinical populations. The current study aims to examine the association between anxiety symptom severity and positive and negative symptom severity in individuals with symptoms below the clinical threshold. We utilized healthy control participants (N = 1100, age range = 21-50) from the UCLA Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics database. Scores from the Chapman Scales and Hopkins Symptom Checklist scale were assessed to determine the relationship between subclinical levels of positive and negative psychosis symptoms and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Pearson’s correlations indicated that there are significant positive relationships between anxiety and perceptual aberrations (r = 0.241, p <.001) and anxiety and social anhedonia (r = 0.128, p <.001), but not anxiety and physical anhedonia (r = 0.009, p =0.767). Further analyses will examine how the relationship between subclinical anxiety and psychosis symptoms may be moderated by cognitive functioning.

Background: While perceptions of stigma have been extensively studied in caregivers of autistic adults, little is known about how autistic individuals themselves experience stigma. Objectives: This study investigates how mental health, cognitive abilities, adaptive functioning, and demographic factors influence the perception of stigma in individuals with autism & their caregivers and explores how these relationships change over time. Methods: Data were collected from 62 participants with autism or non-ASD developmental delays from an ongoing longitudinal study. Stigma perceptions were assessed at three time points from ages 25-33 using both self and caregiver-reports. Predictor variables included demographic factors, cognitive abilities, adaptive functioning, and mental health measures. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, group comparisons, correlation analysis, and linear regression models. Results: Distinct patterns emerged across stigma perception variables, with greater social-communication challenges linked to reduced self-awareness, and greater well-being predicting higher self-awareness of difference. Conclusions: These findings suggest that greater social-communication difficulties are linked to reduced self-awareness of differences, while higher psychological well-being is associated with more accurate self- and social perception. Understanding the trajectory of perceptions of stigma over time provides critical insight to ensure equity in support services for autistic individuals.

Analogical reasoning involves identifying relationships between concepts. Knowledge of familiar concepts facilitates learning of new ones in this important learning process. Co-speech deictic gestures improve children’s analogical reasoning by supporting their inhibitory control and working memory. It is unknown whether analogical gestures can aid children’s analogical reasoning and whether they do so via similar mechanisms. The present study seeks to address these questions by assessing how children’s understanding of the relational meanings behind analogical gestures relates to their performance in an analogical reasoning task using these gestures. In the task, they are asked to select the picture that shows the same relationship as the source image. Upon completion, we ask children a series of questions about the analogical gestures previously used. We evaluate first whether children pay attention to the gestures; second, whether they understand the meaning of the analogical gestures; and third, their ability to produce an original gesture that depicts the same relationship as the one used in the task to assess their understanding of the relation. We expect that children who understand the analogical gestures and the relations will perform better in the analogical reasoning task. The findings will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms by which gestures help children reason, which can inform the way we incorporate gestures into early childhood education.