David Hallford

Deakin University · School of Psychology

Anhedonia, apathy and a motivation are common experiences among young people. These var iables are central symptoms of mental disorders, particularly in depression. Purpose in life has been shown to counteract depressive symptomatology, but this has hardly been studied in chil dren. The construction of personal identity and episodic future thought...

This review examines post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and associated factors, amongst parents of autistic children. A systematic review of the literature produced seven studies (N=1717) that met the selection criteria. A random-effects model showed that 24% of the aggregated sample experienced PTSD symptoms. Child behaviours of concern and p...

Background Suicide is recognized as a significant public health issue, with adolescents/young people being a risk group of concern. Taking the integrated motivational-volitional model as a reference, this study focuses on analyzing the association between defeat and entrapment, on the one hand, and suicide risk, on the other, in a university popula...

Background Reminiscence-based interventions involve the recall and adaptive review of meaningful autobiographical memories. The current component study compared standard facilitator-guided, group-based brief cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) to the single component of self-guided homework sheets only, assessing impacts on psychological resources...

Previous work has suggested that mental imagery may represent a useful strategy for improving prospection and may also help to motivate goal-directed behaviours. Given depressed individuals have difficultly engaging with pleasurable activities, this study aimed to explore the effect of motivational mental imagery on behavioural engagement in non-de...

The current study aimed to assess whether online suicide risk assessment affects state mood and is the first to examine if suicide‐related self‐stigma or coping related to suicidal ideation are predictors of mood change. The Australian participants ( N = 661, M age = 34.9, SD = 12.3, 57.1% female), recruited through a crowd‐sourcing platform, compl...

Current research indicates that anxiety disorders and elevated levels of trait anxiety are associated with biases and impairments when thinking of personally relevant future events, i.e., future thinking. However, to date, little research has been conducted into how people with symptoms of clinical anxiety perceive the functions of future thinking....

Introduction: Schizophrenia is associated with multiple comorbidities and symptoms, suggestive of common transdiagnostic processes. Elevated intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is one such transdiagnostic process, but little research has been conducted on IU in schizophrenia. Methods: This study assessed the associations between IU, schizophrenia diagn...

Many people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) experience profound amotivation, which is strongly related to anticipatory anhedonia. Yet, the neuropsychological fundamentals of anticipatory anhedonia and amotivation are barely understood, resulting in a lack of effective treatments for these patients. Aberrancies in positive mental imagery...

Parents of autistic children demonstrate elevated traumatic stress symptoms, but seldom receive diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex-PTSD. An accurate assessment of Criterion A is essential for a valid diagnosis of these disorders, yet it is uncertain whether Criterion A, as defined by the two primary international diagnost...

Impaired episodic future thinking (EFT), as reflected in reduced specificity, low levels of detail and less use of mental imagery, has been associated with depressive symptomatology. The beneficial impact of Future Event Specificity Training (FEST) on impaired EFT has recently been demonstrated, as well as on anhedonia, the core symptom of depressi...

Background Many stress-related mental health problems, like depression and anxiety, emerge during adolescence, with some recent studies suggesting numbers are increasing. One possible way to reduce adolescents' vulnerability to stress-related mental health problems is to increase their resilience by training them in recalling specific positive memo...

The precise nature of the relationship between mindfulness, psychological flexibility (PF) and psychopathology in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) remains largely unclear and warrants further investigation. We recruited 43 persons with SSD and 43 controls. Our findings revealed that SSD showed lower mindfulness and PF than controls. Mindfulne...

Future thinking is the ability to mentally simulate future scenarios, events, or circumstances that one might be personally involved in. The present study sought to evaluate the Persian version of Functions of Future Thinking Scale (FoFTS) in a large sample of the Iranian general population and to compare individuals with normal versus pathological...

Objective Impairments in episodic future thinking and anticipatory pleasure were noted to explain the depressive symptoms in adults however similar studies are not there in adolescents. This study examined whether there are impairments in episodic future thinking and anticipatory pleasure in clinically-depressed adolescents as compared to non-depre...

Reminiscence-based interventions focus on recalling autobiographical memories and reflective reasoning to develop a healthy and adaptive view of oneself and one’s life. This study aimed to replicate the effects of a three-session, group-based, positive-memory version of cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) on psychological resources and mental well...

Autobiographical reasoning is a process by which an individual creates a coherent life account. The degree of coherence in autobiographical reasoning has been related to psychological health correlates such as depression and self-esteem in previous studies, but with inconsistent findings. Similarly, the basic psychological processes required to ach...

Autobiographical reasoning is a process by which an individual creates a coherent life account. The degree of coherence in autobiographical reasoning has been related to psychological health correlates such as depression and self-esteem in previous studies, but with inconsistent findings. Similarly, the basic psychological processes required to ach...

Individuals build a narrative identity through the construction of an internalised, unfolding life story based on significant autobiographical memories. The current study validated a Dutch version of the Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ-NL), which assesses how aware individuals are of having a narrative identity as well as their...

While impairments in future thinking are well established in adults with psychiatric disorders, this is not so much the case for adolescents, among whom memory specificity, but not future thinking, impairments have been observed. This study examined autobiographical thinking and its correlation with a range of cognitive functioning tasks among 57 a...

Background Depression is characterized by different forms of overgeneralization that are all assumed to play a causal role in the development and course of depression. Methods We examined, in a community sample of over 625 individuals, whether these different forms of overgeneralization are correlated and whether they are prospective predictors of...

Sext dissemination (i.e., the online sharing of sexually explicit images) has the potential to result in legal, social, and psychological harms. Recent research has shown that this behavior can be consensual or non-consensual in nature; yet little is known about how motivations or attitudes may differ between these forms, or with gender. This study...

Researchers have been interested in what retrieval process is responsible for overgeneral autobiographical memories (OGM) in depression. Previous cross-sectional studies demonstrated that, for negatively valenced cues, directly retrieved OGM, rather than generatively retrieved OGM, are associated with depression. However, longitudinal evidence of t...

Disclosure of suicidal ideation and behaviours, defined as thoughts, plans, or attempts, to other people provides opportunity for intervention and prevention. This study is the first to meta-analyze all available studies to estimate the prevalence of disclosure, to whom people disclose, and examine factors that influence disclosure. Databases were...

Background and objectives Overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) has been shown to occur in depressed and previously depressed populations regardless of the emotional valence of cues. However, recent research has pointed out that the retrieval process underlying OGM, generative retrieval (i.e., retrieval requiring effort or additional informatio...

Background Improving future thinking, such as characteristics of specificity, detail, and use of mental imagery, may be one means to reduce anhedonia, particularly in a Major Depressive Episode (MDE) in which future thinking is impaired. The current study aimed to test this using a validated program, Future Event Specificity Training (FEST). Metho...

Difficulty in accessing specific memories, referred to as reduced memory specificity or overgeneral memory, has been established as a marker of clinical depression. However, it is not clear if this deficit persists following the remission of depressive episodes. The current study involved a systematic review and meta‐analysis of empirical studies w...

Narrative identity allows various experiences to be integrated and incorporated into the concept of the self. Recent studies indicate that being aware of developing the story about the self that brings cohesion and meaning may be adaptive. This paper presents preliminary findings across three studies (two quantitative methods and one mixed) aimed a...

Several decades of research have established reduced autobiographical memory specificity, or overgeneral memory, as an important cognitive factor associated with the risk for and maintenance of a range of psychiatric diagnoses. In measuring this construct, experimenters code autobiographical memories for the presence or absence of a single temporal...

Reminiscence-based interventions involve the guided recall and interpretation of autobiographical memories to promote adaptive thinking. This study involved secondary analyses of a recent trial of a positively focused, group-based, three-session version of cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) on perceptions of general relationship quality and inter...

Researchers have been interested in what retrieval process is responsible for overgeneral autobiographical memories (OGM) in depression. Previous cross-sectional studies demonstrated that, for negatively-valenced cues, directly retrieved OGM, rather than generatively retrieved OGM, are associated with depression. However, longitudinal evidence of t...

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a significant global problem. Interventions implemented with youth affected by CSE frequently target singular adjacent issues (e.g., substance misuse or running away); however, research indicates these interventions are most efficacious when they simultaneously treat CSE sequelae (e.g., emotion dysregulation) pair...

Suicide remains a leading cause of preventable death worldwide, despite advances in research and decreases in mental health stigma through government health campaigns. Machine learning (ML), a type of artificial intelligence (AI), is the use of algorithms to simulate and imitate human cognition. Given the lack of improvement in clinician-based suic...

This presentation will introduce the first quantitative, self-report measure of the awareness of narrative identity and how globally coherent one’s autobiographical memories are perceived to be, in terms of temporal ordering, causal associations, and the perception of unifying themes. The construct validity and reliability of the Awareness of Narra...

Imagining future events is a crucial cognitive process in adaptation, but impairments have been identified in a range of mental disorders. Taking a functional approach to future thinking, this paper reports on the development and deployment of a scale to assess the frequency of self-reported functions of future thinking: The Functions of Future Thi...

Previous research with adults has shown mixed findings regarding the correlation between specificity and detailedness within autobiographical memories, and their associations with depressive symptoms. However, minimal research has tested these links in adolescents, despite the importance of this developmental period. The present investigation exami...

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a serious and persistent global issue affecting up to 5% of the child and youth population worldwide; yet there is no universally accepted definition. To develop a theoretically robust definition of CSE, this review systematically synthesized literature examining CSE definitions aiming to develop a conceptual mode...

Reminiscence‐based interventions focus on the recall of autobiographical memories and reflective reasoning about these remembered experiences. This study assessed the effect of a three‐session, positive‐memory version of cognitive‐reminiscence therapy (CRT) on the psychological resources and mental well‐being of young adults. The participants (N =...

Deficits in episodic future thinking (EFT) characteristics such as detail/vividness, specificity and the use of mental imagery are associated with psychopathology. However, whether these characteristics are associated with anxiety is not well understood. This article reports a systematic review and meta-analysis of research examining associations b...

Deficits in episodic future thinking (EFT) characteristics such as detail/vividness, specificity and the use of mental imagery are associated with psychopathology. However, whether these characteristics are associated with anxiety is not well understood. This article reports a systematic review and meta-analysis of research examining associations b...

Disclosure of suicidal ideation and behaviours, defined as thoughts, plans, or attempts, to other people provides opportunity for intervention and prevention. This study is the first to meta-analyse all available studies to estimate the prevalence of disclosure, to whom people disclose, and examine factors that influence disclosure. Databases were...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with reduced specificity in autobiographical memory. It has been argued that this tendency occurs through a failure of effortful generative retrieval, regardless of valence of cue word. However, we propose that in MDD general memories are likely to be recalled via direct retrieval, and direct retrieval...

The Internet Addiction Test is a widely used assessment of symptoms of internet addiction. Although originally proposed as assessing different components of internet addiction, research has been mixed in terms of its factor structure. This study is the first to examine the psychometric properties of the IAT in an Indian population. A large sample (...

Mental simulations of positive future events increase their detail/vividness and plausibility, with effects on cognitive-affective processes such as anticipated and anticipatory pleasure. More recently, spatial details have been distinguished as important in increasing detail and elaborating mental scene construction. Building on this research, thi...

Narrative identity allows us to integrate various experiences and incorporate them into the concept of the self. Recent studies indicate that being aware of developing the story about the self that brings cohesion and meaning may be adaptive. This paper presents preliminary findings across three studies (two quantitative and one mixed methods) aime...

This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a training program to improve the knowledge, attitudes, and self-efficacy of palliative care staff and thus enable them to better detect and manage depression among palliative care patients and their families. Participants were 90 professional carers who completed a four-session training prog...

Reminiscence-based interventions involve the guided recall and interpretation of autobiographical memories to promote adaptive thinking. This study involved secondary analyses of a recent trial of a positively focused, three-session version of cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) on generalised perceptions of relationship quality and interpersonall...

Suicide is a substantial contributor to global mortality, with suicidal ideation (SI) a significant predictor of suicide. Research has demonstrated relationships between dispositional coping styles and SI. This study aimed to advance this research by moving from the disposition coping level to examining the specific coping strategies people use whe...

Decades of research has examined the difficulty that people with psychiatric diagnoses have in recalling specific autobiographical memories of events that lasted less than a day. Instead, they seem to retrieve general events that have occurred many times or which occurred over longer periods of time, termed overgeneral memory. We present the first...

Objective: Improving future thinking may be one means to reduce anhedonia, particularly in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in which future thinking is impaired. The current study therefore examined whether enhancing future thinking is a viable method of reducing anhedonia in MDD. Methods: Participants (N=177; 80.8% women; M age=43.7, SD=11.8) with...

Episodic specificity inductions, involving brief training in recollecting episodic details, have been shown to improve subsequent performance on tasks involving remembering the past, imagining the future and problem solving. The current study examined if specificity inductions targeting self-referential past or future episodic thinking would have d...

Despite the established effectiveness of reminiscence-based interventions for depression, little research exists into the pathways through which specific reminiscence functions are related to depressive symptoms. Drawing on theory of the mechanisms of change in cognitive-reminiscence therapy, the current study tests the hypothesised indirect associ...

Objective: Memory Specificity Training (MeST) improves the recall of past personal experiences, an impairment in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Extending on previous findings that computerised MeST (c-MeST) improves memory specificity and depressive symptoms in adults, this study aimed to answer two questions: 1) does c-MeST improve memory specif...

Difficulty in accessing specific memories, referred to as reduced memory specificity or overgeneral memory, has been established as a marker of clinical depression. However, it is not clear if this deficit persists following the remission of depressive episodes. The current study involved a systematic review and meta-analysis of empirical studies w...

Reminiscence-based interventions focus on the recall of autobiographical memories and reflective reasoning about these remembered experiences. This study assessed the effect of a three-session, positive-memory version of cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) on the psychological resources and mental well-being of young adults. The participants (N=62...

Reminiscence-based psychotherapies have been demonstrated to have robust effects on a range of therapeutic outcomes. However, little research has been conducted on the immediate effects of guided activities they are comprised of, or how these might differ dependent on the type of reminiscence. The current study utilised a controlled experimental de...

Episodic future thinking (EFT) refers to the mental simulation of possible future events; a crucial mental process in adaptation. Psychiatric disorders are associated with deficits in recalling episodic memory, however, no study has reviewed the empirical literature to assess for similar deficits in EFT. A systematic review comparing psychiatric gr...

Impairments in retrieving event-level, specific autobiographical memories, termed overgeneral memory (OGM), are recognised as a feature of clinical depression. A previous meta-analytic review assessing how OGM predicts the course of subsequent depressive symptoms showed small effects for correlations and regression analyses when baseline depressive...

Cognitive-reminiscence therapy is a novel intervention for depression in young adults, and currently no specific clinical guidance exists for its use in this age group. The aim of this article is to disseminate our experiences from a recent clinical trial in which we engaged in cognitive-reminiscence therapy (CRT) with young adults for the purpose...

The coherence of autobiographical memories plays an important role in psychological well-being, as borne out by recent studies. This study aimed to advance this understanding by assessing whether coherence predicted depressive symptoms over time in adults. Further, it aimed to specify mediators through which this association might occur, namely psy...

The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS) is a multidimensional self-report measure that has been used to improve understanding of anticipation (“wanting”) and consummation (“liking”) of reward. The TEPS has been used to assess anhedonia in clinical depression, but its factor structure has not yet been confirmed in this population. This seem...

Sext dissemination presents policy and legislative challenges given its potential psychological, social, and legal harms. We report on a cross-national comparison of sext-image dissemination in a large sample of 1148 young adults aged 18–29 years (M = 22.54, SD = 2.50, 53.0% women, 47.0% men), either U.S. (53.8%) or Australian (46.2%) residents. Th...

Sext dissemination presents policy and legislative challenges given its potential psychological, social, and legal harms. We report on a cross-national comparison of sext-image dissemination in a large sample of 1148 young adults aged 18–29 years (M = 22.54, SD = 2.50, 53.0% women, 47.0% men), either U.S. (53.8%) or Australian (46.2%) residents. Th...

Introduction: Cannabis is the most widely used psychoactive substance among adolescents worldwide, and the age at which consumption begins to decrease. Cannabis use in adolescents is associated with a wide range of adverse consequences in adulthood including increased vulnerability to psychosis and other mental disorders, as well as suicidal ideat...

Mental simulations of positive future events increase their detail/vividness and plausibility, with effects on cognitive-affective processes such as anticipated and anticipatory pleasure. More recently, spatial details have been distinguished as important in increasing detail and elaborating mental scene construction. Building on this research, thi...

Memory Specificity Training (MeST) is an intervention developed from basic science that has found clinical utility. MeST uses cued recall exercises to target the difficulty that some people with emotional disorders have in recalling personally experienced events. MeST is simple enough to be delivered alongside traditional interventions or online by...

Given modest response and high relapse after treatment for Major Depressive Episodes (MDE), the development and refinement of treatments to target cognitive vulnerabilities is indicated. Memory Specificity Training (MeST) remediates deficits in recalling detailed memories of past experiences through repeated practice of autobiographical memory retr...

Decades of research has examined the difficulty that people with psychiatric diagnoses, such as Major Depressive Disorder, Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, have in recalling specific autobiographical memories from events that lasted less than a day. Instead, they seem to retrieve general events that have occurred...

Individuals with depression have difficulty anticipating pleasure, which can negatively impact motivation and functioning. One factor in this may be impairments in their episodic future thinking (EFT). This study examined whether enhancing EFT through increasing detail/vividness and mental imagery would increase anticipatory pleasure among individu...

This investigation examined conflicting suggestions regarding the association between problems retrieving specific autobiographical memories and the tendency to retrieve the details of these memories. We also examined whether these tendencies are differentially related to depression symptoms. U.S., Belgian, Hong Kong and Japanese participants retri...

Background: Characteristic of the cardinal symptom of anhedonia, people with clinical depression report lower levels of anticipatory pleasure. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. This is the first study to assess whether, and to what extent, phenomenological characteristics of episodic future think...

This investigation examined conflicting suggestions regarding the association between problems retrieving specific autobiographical memories and the tendency to retrieve the details of these memories. We also examined whether these tendencies are differentially related to depression symptoms. U.S., Belgian, Hong Kong and Japanese participants retri...