In this article, we review basic research on sexual orientation for a clinical scientist-practitioner audience. We present contemporary and evolving approaches to defining and measuring sexual orientation, and we provide suggestions for how to translate psychological theory into best practices (i.e., how to select appropriate sexuality measures in both research and clinical settings). Our focus is on evaluating currently available measures of sexual orientation in terms of comprehensiveness and feasibility: How thoroughly are components of sexuality captured and how feasible it is to use such measures in research and clinical settings? Basic research in sexuality has progressed beyond our current clinical practices and should be used as a guide to more responsibly conceptualize participants and clients. While we determine that the current options are far from perfect, the critical clinician will find that contemporary measures of sexual orientation prove more useful than more simplistic predecessors. This review will elucidate best strategies for translating sexual orientation research and theory into clinical practice and provide clinicians and researchers alike with theoretically grounded support for tools of measurement and assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Recent work has extended the idea of implicit self-theories to the realm of emotion to assess beliefs in the malleability of emotions. The current article expanded on prior measurement of emotion beliefs in a scale development project. Items were tested and revised over rounds of data collection with both students and nonstudent adult online participants. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor structure. The resulting scale, the Emotion and Regulation Beliefs Scale, assesses beliefs that emotions can hijack self-control, beliefs that emotion regulation is a worthwhile pursuit, and beliefs that emotions can constrain behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that the Emotion and Regulation Beliefs Scale has good internal consistency, is conceptually distinct from measures assessing individuals' beliefs in their management of emotions and facets of emotional intelligence, and predicts clinically relevant outcomes even after controlling for an existing short measure of beliefs in emotion controllability.

Salomaa served as lead for formal analysis, visualization, and writing-original draft, contributed equally to writing-review & editing, and served in a supporting role for conceptualization, data curation, and investigation. Nicholas A. Livingston served as lead for conceptualization, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, and supervision, contributed equally to writing-original draft and writing-review & editing, and served in a supporting role for formal analysis. William T. Bryant contributed equally to investigation, writing-original draft, and writing-review & editing and served in a supporting role for conceptualization. Cara Herbitter contributed equally to investigation, writing-original draft, and writing-review & editing and served in a supporting role for conceptualization. Kelly Harper contributed equally to writing-original draft and writing-review & editing. Colleen A. Sloan contributed equally to writing-review & editing and served in a supporting role for writing-original draft. Zig Hinds contributed equally to data curation and project administration and served in a supporting role for writing-original draft and writing-review & editing. Lisa Gyuro contributed equally to data curation and project administration and served in a supporting role for writing-original draft and writing-review & editing. Sarah E. Valentine contributed equally to writingoriginal draft and writing-review & editing and served in a supporting role for conceptualization. Jillian C. Shipherd served as lead for conceptualization, investigation, methodology, project administration, and supervision and contributed equally to writing-original draft and writingreview & editing.

This chapter reviews mental health research of sexual minorities who are defined by their same-gender sexual behavior. Women who have sex with women (WSW) and men who have sex with men (MSM) encompass not only those who identify as LGBQ+ but also people who identify as heterosexual or are unsure of their sexual orientation. The authors discuss the implications of this broad categorization on the study of mental disorders and psychological distress and present the typical rates of risk for WSW and MSM overall and within subgroups (e.g., heterosexual-identified WSW, Black MSM). This area of research is often hindered by the multiple ways in which MSM and WSW groups can be defined and the vast heterogeneity of people who fall within these categories. Further, because of the origins of WSW/MSM-terminology in HIV/AIDS research, there is a gendered imbalance in allocation of research funding toward MSM over WSW. Future research should address the limitations of this categorization system in understanding mental health by including multiple measures of sexuality to create a fine-grained understanding of which experiences of WSW/MSM transfer risk and by addressing the paucity of research on WSW and their mental health.

The social category label effect describes how labels influence people’s perceptions of social groups. Though the label “homosexual” versus “lesbian/gay” decreases some heterosexual people’s support for sexual minorities, it is unknown how lesbian and gay (LG) people respond to “homosexual” as a label used to describe them. Across three experiments in a largely U.S. context (N=831), we examined how use of “homosexual” influenced people’s responses on psychological instruments, preferences for demographic questions, and evaluations of individuals who use “homosexual.” The use of different labels in psychological measures did not influence LG people’s responses (Study 1). However, LG people reacted less positively to “homosexual” compared to “lesbian/gay” in demographic questions and in interpersonal exchanges (Studies 2-3), whereas heterosexual people’s reactions were largely unaffected. LG people’s more negative reactions to “homosexual” than “lesbian/gay” were partially explained by them perceiving the “homosexual” label user as less culturally competent (i.e., less inclusive, less engaged in LGBTQ activism). In this article, we make progress in new empirical territory (sexual orientation-based cues research), propose the notion of linguistic heterosexism, and discuss the sociopolitical implications of people’s language choices.