The increasing relevance of European rural young people in policy agendas: Contributions from community psychology

Our paper aims to provide a short guide on how community psychologists can contribute to the improvement of rural young people's prospects. After briefly introducing the demographic trends of these young people in continental Europe for the past decade, we list the current challenges faced by rural European young generations, as well as the opportunities emerging for them from the twin transition that can inspire the community psychology field. We then contextualize community psychologists' interventions in this domain according to an ecological-systemic standpoint and by embracing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) perspective on research and practice. We further detail the reasons for adopting a PAR approach in research and practice to address rural young people's challenges and opportunities. Finally, we highlight four potential intermediation missions to uphold community psychologists' rural youth development input, based on the adopted theoretical and methodological standpoint. We conclude that our short guide can facilitate community psychology professionals' complete understanding of rural young generations' prospects, in line with the expected increase in the need for rural young people's participation. Our proposal may also have long-term benefits for rural communities by contributing to the redesigning of intergenerational relationships and securing critical mass.     

Considering poststructuralist discursive community psychology

Although critical community psychology (CCP) has embraced several discursive paradigms (e.g., critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and Foucauldian discourse analysis), there remains little CCP work that attempts to conceive of CCP through a poststructuralist discursive lens, a lens that extends beyond, but certainly does not ignore, the analysis of data. In this study, we consider what we are calling poststructuralist discursive community psychology through a synthesis of poststructuralist discourse theory and CCP. Such a psychology is one that conceives of social phenomena, and indeed conceives of itself, through a poststructuralist understanding of discourse. We offer two pathways through which to consider poststructuralist discursive community psychology: re-envisioning community and discursive consciousness-raising. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical limitations of our discussion, as well as the areas that future work into poststructuralist discursive community psychology may enter into.     

Program evaluation in community psychology

American Journal of Community Psychology -     

Social stress and community psychology

Two questions that embarrass community psychologists are: "What do community psychologists do?" "What's the difference between community psychology and clinical psychology?" A conceptual model is proposed to help to find answers to these questions. The model describes a process whereby psychosocial stress leads to psychopathology. The argument is developed that the apparently disparate activities of community psychologists are uniformly directed at undermining the stress process but, given the complexity of this process, vary because they tackle it at different points.     

A future for community psychology practice

Community psychology has never really looked at its practice as a profession, though many of us as students came to the field with high expectations that we could learn how to make a difference in communities. This article discussed what I think about community psychology practice and how I have tried to approach it. I thank and recognize several people: Paul Florin for his colleagueship, friendship and his contributions to what I have done in the field; Tom Wolff for never letting me give up on the field; Bob Newbrough for his consistent support, encouragement and as my teacher; and Julian Rappaport for his comments on an earlier draft. I thank my colleagues at Rutgers for helping make the dream come true. This article is dedicated to students, past, present, and future.     

Neural network principles for theoretical psychology

Neural networks are an increasingly important tool for the mechanistic understanding of psychological phenomena. Three commonly used principles in neural-network design (associative learning, competition, and opponent processing) are outlined here, and two examples of their use in behavior-modeling architectures are discussed. One example relates to an instance of reinforcement learning; that is, of an organism controlling its environment to maximize positive reinforcement or to minimize negative reinforcement. The other example relates to some characteristic deviations from reinforcement learning that occur in people or monkeys with frontal-lobe damage.     

Multicultural training practices in community psychology programs

Surveyed the directors of 56 community psychology graduate programs to assess multicultural training practices and attitudes. Although most program directors agreed that multicultural training is important in their mission to educate students, less than half the programs (48%) required their students to take any relevant course work and only half of the programs surveyed had any faculty who were members of an ethnic minority group and one third had only one such faculty member. Furthermore, less than half the programs had a combination of training opportunities in place to integrate classroom, research, and field experiences relevant to multicultural issues. Finally, only 23% of program directors believed their training programs were successful for most students, suggesting the need to improve training.