Martin Kuška

• Ph.D.
• Senior Researcher at Sigmund Freud University Vienna

Objective: The Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation—Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) is a pantheoretical mental health assessment instrument that has been translated into over 50 languages. Despite its widespread international use in clinical practice and research, the psychometric properties of CORE-OM require further investigation. Method: We explore...

Background The Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measures (CORE‐OM) is a pantheoretical diagnostic instrument that has been widely used in mental health research. Nevertheless, the exploration of the factor structure of the CORE‐OM yields diverse results. Aims This study aimed to explore the internal structure of the German CORE‐OM...

The temporary closure of the Outpatient Psychotherapy Clinic at the Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna during the Covid-19 pandemic demanded an immediate and unexpected reaction to assure further psychotherapeutic services. Both psychotherapists and patients were forced into a rapid transition to online psychotherapy. While Covid-19 researc...

The COVID-19 outbreak has raised questions about how vulnerable groups experience the pandemic. Research that focuses on the view of individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions is still limited, and so are cross-country comparative surveys. We gathered our sample of qualitative data during the first lockdown after governmental measures a...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic elicited huge stress responses in most world populations, and at this time psychotherapy is an important protective service against this stress. However, a somewhat neglected question is: How stressful was the COVID-19 outbreak for psychotherapists themselves? The main aim of the present study was to inve...

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) suffer from a wide range of non-motor symptoms, including cognitive deficits and impairment of emotional processing. The present study aimed to explore in PD patients compared to healthy adults the relationship between cognitive performance and emotional creativity (EC), defined as a set of cognitive abilities...

Emotion concepts are representations that enable people to make sense of their own and others’ emotions. The present study, theoretically driven by the conceptual act theory, explores the overall spectrum of emotion concepts in older adults and compares them with the emotion concepts of younger adults. Data from 178 older adults (⩾55 years) and 176...

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NS), such as depression, apathy, hallucinations, etc., as well as changes in creativity in older age, are telltale marks in the development of such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Lewy body disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Both NS and creativity are important non-cogn...

Psychotherapists around the world are facing an unprecedented situation with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). To combat the rapid spread of the virus, direct contact with others has to be avoided when possible. Therefore, remote psychotherapy provides a valuable option to continue mental health care during the COVID-19 pand...

Previous research has shown that cognitive creativity decreases in older adulthood. However, the impact of age on emotional creativity remains unknown. The main aim of the present study was to explore how emotional creativity differs across adulthood. A total of 407 participants (251 women, 156 men) consisting of older, midlife and younger adults w...

BACKGROUND Tinnitus Talk (TT) is a non-profit online self-help forum. Asking inactive users about reasons for discontinued usage of health-related online platforms such as TT is important for quality assurance. OBJECTIVE To explore reasons for discontinued use of TT and relations to perception of TT as well as age in former TT users, who did not l...

Background Tinnitus Talk is a nonprofit online self-help forum. Asking inactive users about their reasons for discontinued usage of health-related online platforms such as Tinnitus Talk is important for quality assurance. Objective The aim of this study was to explore reasons for discontinued use of Tinnitus Talk, and their associations to the perc...

Emotional creativity (EC) is a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. EC has been found to be related to various constructs across different fields of psychology during the past 30 years, but a comprehensive examination of previous research is still lacking. The goal...

This study explored the relationships of neuroticism with subjective assessments of 10 discrete negative emotions. One hundred eighty seven university students from 19 to 34 years (males = 85, females = 102) completed the Eysenck Personality Scales. Further, they evaluated the valence of 10 given negative emotions - disgust, anger, sadness, fear, c...

The personality traits of social work leaders are important factors influencing ethical decision-making in organisations. The lack of empirical evidence with regard to the relationship between personal authenticity and ethical decision-making in social work stimulated the present study. Two hundred and thirty-eight leaders (81.9% female) from organ...

Little is known about the relationship between emotional creativity and age-related cognitive decline. This study explored how deficits in some cognitive abilities are related to emotional creativity, i.e., cognitive abilities relating to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. One hundred and eighty-seven older adults (mean age =...

The aim of this study was to determine the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric effects of continuous positive airway pressure treatment on patients with obstructive sleep apnea. This cross‐sectional, prospective, observational study included 126 patients with sleep apnea. The following tests were performed: the Montreal Cognitive Assessment for the...

Emo youth subculture bases its subcultural identification mostly on symbols of death, dying, suicide and other kinds of morbid content. The main goal of the present study was to explore attitudes toward suicidal behaviour and self-injury in emo adolescents. Semistructured in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 14 emo adherents, accompa...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is often accompanied by significant changes in emotionality, such as apathy, anhedonia, anxiety and depression. The present review summarizes the empirical evidence, including amygdala changes and psychological changes in emotionality in people suffering from PD. Seventeen empirical full-text articles including research on...

The philosophy of mind concerns much about how novelty occurs in the world. The very recent progress in this field inspired by quantum mechanics indicates that symmetry restoration occurs in the mind at the moment when new creative thought arises. Symmetry restoration denotes the moment when one's cognition leaves ordinary internalized mental schem...

The role of emotional creativity in practicing creative leisure activities and in the preference of college majors remains unknown. This study aims to explore how emotional creativity measured by the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI; Averill, 1999) is interrelated with the real-life involvement in different types of specific creative leisure act...

People construe reality by using words as basic units of meaningful categorization. The present theory-driven study applied the method of a free association task to explore how people express the concepts of the world and the self in words. The respondents were asked to recall any five words relating with the word world. Afterward they were asked t...

The widely accepted two-dimensional circumplex model of emotions posits that most instances of human emotional experience can be understood within the two general dimensions of valence and activation. Currently, this model is facing some criticism, because complex emotions in particular are hard to define within only these two general dimensions. T...

Qualitative data acquired within the recent Czech part of the independent, multi-site collaborative research project Corrective Experiences are the core basis of this paper. Eight post-treatment interviews with clients of individual therapies were analysed with a special focus on the role of cultural beliefs and cultural expectations in the clients...

This chapter aims to demonstrate the dynamic aspects of inequalities forming within the family and friendship networks. The Velvet Revolution in 1989 triggered strong transformation processes in Czech society. Since that time, many changes in social relations have emerged in both the public and private spheres. The example of Czech society will be...

Past empirical research has neglected the relationship of neuroticism and semantic perception of different emotions. Therefore, this study explored relationships of neuroticism with subjective assessments of 10 discrete negative emotions. One hundred eighty seven university students from 19 to 34 years (males = 85, females = 102) completed Eysenck...

Coping strategies belong undoubtedly to the most relevant variables for human performance and health. The Stress Coping Style Questionnaire SVF 78 has previously received critical remarks for the lack of theoretical foundations and unclear interrelationships between included strategies of coping. The present study verifies the factor structure of S...

The phenomenon of self-inflicting pain through wounding of the body surface is usually subsumed in the category of "self-harm" and, most often, it is considered to be a psychopathological symptom. However, in the adolescents who cut their skin on the hands and arms, the intention to harm themselves, that might be interpreted in terms of related psy...