**3. Method**

The sample is composed by 327 female students from different faculties of the University of Padova: 58.4% from Psychology, 17.1% from Educational Sciences, 9.5% from International Economy, 6.7% from Social Services, 5.2% from Human Rights and Multi-Governance, 1.5% from Communication Strategies, and 1.5% from Engineering.

Complete demographics of the sample are displayed in **Table 1**.

The participants were recruited on a voluntary basis and were part of a broader study on early traumatic experiences and adult psychological outcomes. All participants signed a consent form and no compensation was given for participation.

### **3.1. Measures**

Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, CTQ-SF, [52] in order to assess the presence and severity of childhood traumatic experiences; the Experience in Close Relationship-Revised, ECR-R, [53] for the evaluation of the romantic attachment; and the Post-traumatic Checklist for DSM-5, PCL-5 [54] for the post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.

The *Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form* (CTQ-SF; Bernstein et al. [52]) is a self-report questionnaire used to assess retrospectively the frequency and severity of different childhood experiences of abuse (emotional, physical, sexual) and neglect (emotional, physical). The short form consists of 28 items, scored on a 5-point (Never True-Very Often True, when growing up) Likert scale. Twenty-five items are equally distributed among five clinical scales: Physical Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Physical Neglect and Emotional Neglect. Three items assess the tendencies of responders to minimize or deny negative childhood experiences, composing the minimization/denial scale. In the present study, the Italian version of CTQ-SF, translated by Petrone and colleagues [55], was administered. The original study of Bernstein [52] demonstrated good internal consistency reliability for each of the CTQ-SF scales, across four heterogeneous clinical and not clinical samples. Cronbach's α ranged respectively from 0.83 to 0.86 for Physical Abuse, 0.84 to 0.89 for Emotional Abuse, 0.92 to 0.95 for Sexual Abuse; 0.61 to 0.78 for Physical Neglect and 0.85 to 0.91 for Emotional Neglect. In particular, in the community sample the reliability ranged from α = 0.61 for the Physical Neglect to α = 0.92 for the Sexual Abuse. For the Italian version, the CTQ-SF showed reliable psychometrics, with good reliability and confirmed structure validity (Sacchi, Simonelli, in preparation). In the present study, the Cronbach's α ranged from 0.51 for Physical Neglect to 0.90 for the Sexual Abuse, confirming that Physical Neglect represents the less reliable scale of the self-report.


**Table 1.** Demographics of the sample (*N = 327*).

The *Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Revised* (ECR-R; Fraley et al. [53]; Italian version Calvo, 2008) is a 36-item questionnaire that measures the adult romantic attachment style. Respondents are given a description of a possible attitude toward relationships and asked to rate them on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree." The ECR-R contains two subscales that measure orthogonal dimensions of adult romantic attachment: attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety; each dimension is measured by summing 18 items. The ECR-R presented excellent psychometric properties in its Italian version. In the cross-cultural study of Calvo [56], the Cronbach's α was 0.93 for the avoidance and 0.88 for the anxiety. In the present study, the internal consistency reliability of the ECR-R was α = 0.93 for the attachment avoidance scale and α = 0.90 for the attachment anxiety scale.

The *Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist* for DSM-5 (PCL-5; Weathers et al. [54]) is a 20-item self-report for the assessment of current post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. The PCL-5 is developed from the PCL, and the 20 items correspond to the 20 symptoms describing the diagnosis of PTSD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders V version [57]. Since no Italian version for the PCL-5 is currently available, in the present study the original version was translated, using the back-translation method [58]. The 20 items belong to four sub-scales representing different clusters of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. The severity of each class of symptoms is obtained by the sum of the scores within each cluster. For a provisional PTSD diagnosis and in order to have cutoff scores for the evaluation of symptoms' severity, items score 2 (moderately) or higher are considered as symptoms. In particular, the PCL-5 diagnosis requires at least: 1 B item, 1 C item, 2 D items and 2 E items score 2 or higher. Preliminary validation work proposes the overall cutoff point of 38 for the PTSD diagnosis, as "reasonable" http://www.ptsd.va.gov/. The PCL was largely examined, demonstrating excellent psychometric properties [59], while less information is available on PCL-5. Two recent studies demonstrate high internal consistency, with Cronbach's α of 0.94 and 0.95. In the present study, the internal consistency reliability result scored high for each cluster and for the overall measure. In particular, the overall Cronbach's α was 0.93.
