Funeral services are known to serve multiple functions for bereaved persons. There is also a common, intuitively reasonable assumption of positive associations between engaging in funeral activities and adjustment to bereavement. We examined whether restricting ceremonial cremation arrangements to a minimum has a negative association with grief over time. Bereaved persons in the United Kingdom completed questionnaires 2 to 5 months postloss and again a year later ( N = 233 with complete data; dropout = 11.4%). Neither type nor elaborateness of the cremation service, nor satisfaction with arrangements (typically high), emerged as significantly related to grief; no major subgroup differences (e.g., according to income level) were found. Results suggested that it does not matter to grief whether a more minimalistic or elaborate funeral ceremony was observed. We concluded that the funeral industry represented in this investigation is offering bereaved people the range of choices regarding cremation arrangements to meet their needs. Limits to generalizability are discussed.

Violence against therapists by their clients are a common occurrence across clinical settings and may have a lasting impact on the clinician’s professional and personal functioning. In spite of this, no study to date has looked at the frequency of trauma-induced symptoms in psychotherapists. Using a sample of N = 917 psychotherapists across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we analyzed the frequency and sequelae of patient attacks suffered or witnessed by therapists. More than half (51.3%) of the sample reported having been the victim or witness of patient attacks or threats of violence in their career. Among the affected therapists, 27.7% reported posttraumatic symptoms lasting longer than four weeks and 2.7% presented symptoms amounting to a full-PTSD diagnosis. Thus, while the frequency of attacks and trauma-induced symptoms were considerable, estimated PTSD rates were rather low. The findings suggest that practitioners should be conscious of client violence being an occupational risk and that it is advisable to have protective measures in place.

Latent class analysis (LCA) refers to a family of techniques for identifying groupsin data based on a parametric model. Examples include mixture models, LCA with ordinal indicators, and latent class growth analysis. Despite the popularity of this technique, there is limited guidance with respect to best practices in estimating and reporting mixture models. Moreover, there is a lack of user-friendly open-source implementations of advanced LCA techniques. This paper addresses contemporary best practices for estimating and reporting LCA, which are summarized in the SMART-LCA checklist: Standards for More Accuracy in Reporting of different Types of Latent Class Analysis. It further introduces new functionality for LCA in the tidySEM R-package. This free open-source software package has a low threshold for beginners due to user-friendly wrapper functions, but a high ceiling for expert users as it is embedded within the flexible OpenMx structural equation modeling framework. Tutorial examples of several common use cases of LCA are included to illustrate best practices LCA using the Free open-source Software Package tidySEM.

This study investigated the utility of active learning in accelerating the systematic review process. We systematically reviewed literature from 2006 onwards, using the open-source software ASReview, and selected 48 relevant articles out of 1548, while incorporating 208 out of 305 collected datasets. Our analysis overwhelmingly recommends active learning for improving the efficiency of the screening phase in systematic reviews, despite some limitations. Future research should focus on standardizing metrics, promoting open data, and diversifying models to advance active learning in systematic reviews.

Does restricting the ceremonial/ritual arrangements around a cremation to a minimum have a negative association with grief over time? This question has increasingly concerned professionals in the funeral industry as well as those in healthcare capacities working with bereaved persons. We examined the relationship between cremation arrangements and levels of grief. Bereaved people in the UK completed questionnaires 2 to 5 months post-loss and a year later (N=233 with complete data). Complexity of the cremation service was not significantly related to grief; neither was satisfaction with arrangements (which was typically high). Results suggested that it makes no difference to grief whether a more minimalistic or elaborate funeral ceremony is chosen under conditions where the bereaved feel free to make choices that best suit their situation. We concluded that the funeral industry seems to be offering bereaved people an appropriate range of cremation arrangement choices to meet their needs. Important limits to generalizability are discussed. That funeral services serve multiple functions for bereaved persons is emphasized.