Background. Due to their developmental capacities, younger children may find it challenging to articulate their emotions and experiences related to traumatic events. Since play is a natural part of their development, play-based assessment tools can effectively explore their inner world and identify signs of traumatization. There is a need for valid methods to evaluate young children’s (4 to 8 years) psychological difficulties related to traumatic experiences. The Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS), developed by Danish researchers, is a play-based story stem assessment tool developed to screen for indicators of traumatization in young children. Just a few studies of the OCTS have been published so far.

Objective. The current study aimed to test the reliability and convergent validity of the OCTS in the Lithuanian community and risk subsamples of young children aged 4-8 years.

Method. The total sample consisted of 209 participants (58.9% girls) from the community (47.4%) and risk (52.6%) subsamples, Mage = 6.29 (SD = 1.48). All children were screened with the OCTS, and caregivers completed self-report questionnaires: demographics, the Child and Adolescent Trauma Screen-Caregiver (CATS-C), and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ).

Results. The data suggests that the OCTS has very good inter-rater reliability. The OCTS, SDQ, and CATS-C scores were significantly higher in the risk subsample, with small to large effect sizes. Boys and younger children (3-4-year-olds) scored higher on the OCTS. Out of all the OCTS stories, the Burnt hand story had significant correlation coefficients with all the CATS-C PTSD symptoms.

Conclusions. The OCTS seems promising tool in Lithuania, but there were variations in scores between the Lithuanian data and an earlier study of the Danish sample. Future studies on the OCTS would benefit from further cross-cultural, reliability and the validity examination.

The determination of a child’s best interests in custody and contact disputes remains one of the most complex and debated issues in developmental psychology and family law. Despite its prominence in international frameworks, the best interests principle often lacks a clear, evidence-based operationalisation, leading to subjective or inconsistent evaluation and decision-making criteria. This presentation introduces the Best Interests Matrix - a structured evaluation tool designed to assist psychologists, social workers, and legal professionals in assessing children’s biopsychosocial and emotional well-being in child custody cases.

Grounded in a developmental approach, the Best Interests Matrix was developed and implemented in Brazil, where legal and psychosocial professionals have been trained in its application. User feedback has highlighted the tool’s usability and suitability for a child-centred evaluation process in child custody cases. The tool incorporates key risk and protective factors that influence child outcomes post-separation, such as parental conflict, attachment security, and environmental stability. It is informed by a comparative study of custody decision-making in Brazil and England, shedding light on jurisdictional differences in conceptualising children’s needs and well-being. A user evaluation conducted with trained professionals demonstrated the tool’s effectiveness in enhancing structured decision-making, reducing biases, and fostering a more child-centred approach.

This presentation will highlight how judicial and psychosocial actors shape developmental outcomes through custody evaluations and decisions and how this tool can best assist them in this process. By introducing a systematic framework for evaluating children’s best interests, the Best Interests Matrix contributes to a more transparent, developmentally sensitive, and ethically sound approach to custody assessments

In recent years, online platforms have made educational, medical, and other professional content easily accessible, but research assessing such platforms is still scarce. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate LONDI. Londi is a German platform that offers scientifically based information about learning disorders for different user groups. It also offers an algorithm-based help system that professionals can use to facilitate diagnosing learning disorders and planning interventions. The evaluation is focused on mental health professionals (i.e., learning therapists and school psychologists) using the information pages of the platform and its help system. It is theoretically grounded on the RE-AIM framework and assesses four of its dimensions: Reach, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance. Results from an online questionnaire (N = 582) showed that the platform reaches a large proportion of mental health professionals. Another online questionnaire (N = 122) revealed that most users plan to adopt the help system, and this is predicted by both its pragmatic and hedonic qualities. Data from the Matomo web analytics software (N = 9,007 online visits) regarding implementation revealed that most visits were done via smartphones. Moreover, users stayed long enough to read index but not information pages, suggesting index pages’ importance for orientation, and users’ disinterest in reading long texts. Engagement with the platform’s chatbot was extremely low, suggesting it was not noticeable or useful enough. This could also be a result of age dependent openness to AI based interfaces. Strikingly, the number of platform visits increased by 110% in 2024 vs. 2023. Future efforts are needed to maintain this growth, and improve chatbot engagement. This study is one of the first to utilize the RE-AIM framework with web analytics, paving the way for further theory-grounded platform assessments.

There have been shortcomings in the assessment of student burnout, which justifies the development of better tools to assess student burnout, both psychometrically and in terms of content. To this end, we adapted the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT; de Beer et al., 2020; Schaufeli et al., 2020) to the context of studying and tested it with students from three different educational contexts: general upper secondary (N = 1922), vocational upper secondary (N = 623), and higher education (N = 772). The BAT consists of four dimensions: exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment. First, we investigated the psychometric properties of the BAT, including tests of measurement invariance across the three samples, and construct validity. Second, we examined what kinds of engagement and burnout profiles can be identified among general upper secondary, vocational upper secondary, and university students and how these profiles are associated with well-being. We used a shortened BAT12 questionnaire (3 items/dimension). Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine factor structure and measurement invariance across data sets. The structure of the BAT was consistent with the theoretical assumption of four correlated dimensions of burnout and invariant across the three contexts. Reliabilities ranged from .75 to .86. Moreover, the associations with other well-being variables were meaningful; burnout was related negatively to engagement and positively to depressive symptoms. By using multigroup latent profile analysis, we identified five engagement and burnout profiles: engaged (high engagement, low burnout), engaged-strained (high engagement, high exhaustion and cognitive impairment), moderately engaged (moderate engagement, moderate burnout), disengaged-distant (low engagement, high mental distance), and burned-out (low engagement, high all burnout symptoms). The BAT measure appears to be a valid and promising method for assessing student burnout, at least in upper secondary and higher education. Emotional and cognitive impairment seemed pertinent when investigating study-related pressures in these contexts.

Individual-level resilience has been conceptualized in numerous ways, including as a dynamic process that encompasses positive adaption in the face of adversity (Luthar et al., 2000). Two widely used measures, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10) and the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S), assess stress coping ability and perseverance toward long-term goals, respectively. This study aims to validate and compare these measures of resilience by evaluating their reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity in an international sample of health care professionals.

Data will be collected in spring 2025 in six European countries as well as USA, as part of the Apollo2028 project on healthcare wellbeing and resilience. Participants (N ≈ 1000) will complete the CD-RISC and Grit-S, along with measures of psychological well-being, and mental health outcomes. Additionally, two-week daily measures data on stressors and affect will be collected to examine emotional reactivity to stress as an external validity criterion. Internal consistency will be assessed using Cronbach’s a, while confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) will test the scales’ factor structures. Convergent and discriminant validity will be examined through correlations with related psychological constructs, including daily measures-derived emotional reactivity indicators.

Given the diverse sample—including participants within the health care sector from multiple countries, professions, and demographic groups—measurement invariance testing will determine whether the scales function equivalently across these subgroups. Configural, metric, and scalar invariance tests will assess cross-group comparability.

The findings will contribute to the validation of the CD-RISC and Grit-S, offering insights into their psychometric properties, relationships with real-time emotional responses to stress, and applicability in healthcare settings, as well as to the discussion on conceptualization and operationalization of resilience.