Introduction to the special issue on computational cognitive modeling

This special issue of Cognitive Systems Research features the top twelve papers from the 4^th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM-2001). These papers represent the current trends in computational cognitive modeling, displaying both the diversity and commonalities of the field. This introduction to the special issue describes the motivations for the conference and the special issue, and overviews the diversity and commonalities found in the papers.     

Criminal Justice and Community Psychology: Our Values and Our Work—The Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of The American Journal of Community Psychology originated from the Society for Community Research and Action Criminal Justice interest group, with a goal of exploring the work of community psychologists intersecting with criminal justice research, practice, and policy and shaped by our shared values—equity, collaboration, creative maladjustment, social justice, and social science in the service of social justice. In this introduction, we discuss the socio‐historical context of the special issue, followed by an outline of the special issue organization, and brief summary of the included papers. Across 13 papers and an invited commentary, we see the ways in which community psychologists are: (1) delivering and evaluating services, programming, or other supports to address the needs of system‐involved people; and (2) working to improve the systems, structures, and interactions with units of criminal justice systems. Across these two sections, authors highlight the guiding role of our values to influence change within and outside of criminal‐legal systems.     

A History of Women and Feminist Perspectives in Community Psychology

Using an historical framework, we document and assess efforts to include women, women's issues, and feminism in community psychology and in the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA). Initiatives of the SCRA Task Force/Committee on Women are traced from its inception to present. We also chronicle the dilemmas and difficulties of moving toward a feminist community psychology. The history is divided into five phases. Each phase is described in terms of women's involvement in the field and efforts to integrate feminist content into research and practice of the field. Reflections on the qualities of contexts that have both supported and inhibited inclusion are identified. We look to this history to try to understand the observation that while women have been increasingly visible in leadership roles and women's professional development has been encouraged, less progress has been made toward building a feminist community psychology.     

Contributions of qualitative research to the validity of intervention research

The Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Subcommittee (IQRS) of the Task for on Evidence-based Interventions in School Psychology assumed the responsibility of developing criteria for reviewing qualitative methods used in intervention research. The IQRS, composed primarily of psychologists and anthropologists, was confronted with the long-standing debate between qualitative and quantitative researchers and with the task of explicating the potential contributions of qualitative research to establishing an evidence base for interventions in school psychology. Consequently, the outcomes of the subcommittee's work included not only a set of criteria for evaluating qualitative research but also a clearer understanding of the added value of mixed qualitative-quantitative approaches to intervention research. The purposes of this article are to provide an overview of qualitative research, present the criteria set forth by the IQRS, discuss the role of qualitative research in establishing the foundation for evidence-based practice, and introduce the illustrative research articles of the special issue. The four studies highlighted in this issue represent applications of qualitative research that meet the IQRS criteria and demonstrate the potential of qualitative research, conducted within a mixed-method framework, for enhancing our understanding of school-based interventions.     

Management of Behavioral Problems in Late Life—Therapeutic Approaches and Related Issues: Introduction to a Special Issue

In this introduction, I provide a brief overview of the five papers contained within this special issue of the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology. The purpose of this issue is to provide new information and insight into various therapeutic approaches and issues related to the assessment and treatment of behavioral problems in older adults. These papers cover both basic and applied issues pertaining to the broad topic of behavioral management in late adulthood, offering new insights and directions for future research.     

Social learning in humans and nonhuman animals: theoretical and empirical dissections

The past decade has seen a resurgent, concerted interest in social learning research comparing human and nonhuman animals. In this special issue, we present a synthesis of work that consolidates what is currently known and provides a platform for future research. Consequently, we include both new empirical studies and novel theoretical proposals describing work with both human children and adults and a range of nonhuman animals. In this introduction, we describe the background of this special issue and provide a context for each of the eight articles it contains. We hope such introduction will not only help the reader synthesize the interdisciplinary views that characterize this broad field, but also stimulate development of new methods, concepts, and data.     

Editors’ introduction: social dynamics and collective rationality

We provide a brief introduction to this special issue on social dynamics and collective rationality, and summarize the gist of the papers collected therein.     

Methodological developments in personality research: An introduction

This article first provides a brief overview of some of the empirical and conceptual work in personality following Mischel's (1968) critique Strengths and weaknesses of traditional personality research designs including laboratory experiments, experimental personality designs, and preexperimental correlational studies are presented Some more recent approaches to designing laboratory research that attempt to address issues of external validity and approaches to designing field Investigations that attempt to address issues of internal validity are discussed Issues associated with the measurement of constructs, the broadening of measurement methods, and newer data analytic techniques are noted Finally, a brief orientation to the other papers in the special issue is presented     

Situation awareness in human-machine interactive systems

This special issue brings together six papers on situation awareness in human-machine interactive systems, in particular in teams of collaborating humans and artificial agents. The editorial provides a brief introduction and overviews the contributions, addressing issues such as team and shared situation awareness, trust, transparency, timing, engagement, and ethical aspects.     

Challenging the Universality of Job Resources: Why,When, and For Whom Are They Beneficial?

In this paper we introduce the topic of job resources and elaborate on their relevance for research and practice in work psychology. We start out with a brief overview of the historic and current understanding of job resources. Next, we discuss the need for a more nuanced perspective on the effects of job resources and present some ideas on how to move this forward. After these conceptual preliminaries, we introduce the papers in the special issue and conclude with a brief summary of the special issue's key messages.     

Introduction to Michotte's heritage in perception and cognition research

Several decades after Michotte's work was published, it continues to inspire current research in perception, cognition, and beyond. In this special issue we pay tribute to this heritage with a collection of empirical and theoretical papers on amodal completion and the perception of causality, two areas of research within which Michotte's work and ideas have had a lasting influence. As a background to better understand the remaining papers, we briefly sketch Michotte's life and work and the scope (in breadth and in depth) of his impact. We then review Michotte's seminal contributions to the areas covered in this special issue, some of the major research discoveries and themes in the intervening decades, and the major open questions and challenges we are still facing. We also include a sneak preview of the papers in this special issue, noting how they relate to Michotte's work and to each other. This review shows both how much influence Michotte has had on contemporary perception and cognition research, and how much important work remains to be done. We hope that the papers in this special issue will serve both to celebrate Michotte's heritage in this respect, and to inspire other investigators to continue the projects he began.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Defining Gender,Relationships, and Power

Limitations in our knowledge of women's lives are most strikingly revealed by social scientists' attempts to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Most psychological research studies Anglo middle- and upper-middle-class college students, to the detriment of our current need for knowledge of the populations of women most at risk for HIV/AIDS, who are non-Anglo, poor, and less educated. This special issue was initiated by the Task Force on Women and HIV of the Society for the Psychology of Women, Division 35 of the American Psychological Association. Our immediate objective was to present in a single issue a full range of current research practices and needs along with any exemplary innovations, and to identify the dilemmas facing investigators that might be blocking theory development. We hope to inspire, inform, and energize those whose contributions are most needed to advance theory and research that will be helpful to researchers and practitioners of HIV prevention and services. The long-range goal of this special issue is to stimulate innovative and useful theory development by gathering empirical work that challenges current theory and shows the role of culture.     

Understanding allies’ participation in social change: A multiple perspectives approach

The introduction to the EJSP special issue brings together recent literature on allyship. We present and discuss different definitions of allyship and highlight a multiple perspectives approach to understanding the predictors and consequences of allyship. This approach suggests that engagement in allyship can be driven by egalitarian and non-egalitarian motivations and that the behaviours identified as allyship can have different meanings, causes and consequences depending on whether researchers take into account the allies’ perspective or the disadvantaged groups’ perspective. We use this approach as an organizing principle to identify themes that emerge in the papers included in this special issue. We start with four papers that consider the perspective of the advantaged group, followed by two papers that consider the perspective of the disadvantaged group. Finally, we introduce two theoretical papers that examine the relations between disadvantaged groups and allies, and we set out directions for future research.     

The Making of an Interdisciplinary Partnership: The Case of the Chicago Food System Collaborative

Interdisciplinary partnerships foster innovation to address pressing social problems. This paper describes an interdisciplinary partnership called the Chicago Food System Collaborative (CFSC) composed of a team of partners from four academic institutions and three community-based organizations representing a total of eight disciplines that included: community development and community organizing, community psychology, geography, nursing, nutrition, public health, sociology, and urban planning and policy. Partners came together to address the issue of access to healthy foods and nutrition in a working class African American neighborhood. We analyze and discuss the core principles that guided the partnership and its impact across three dimensions: understanding through interdisciplinary action research, building capacity, and facilitating innovations in practices and policies. Despite the challenges of interdisciplinary partnerships, the potential benefits and impact of such efforts reflect their value as a comprehensive approach to addressing complex social problems.     

Personality and Coping: Three Generations of Research

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Journal of Personality 's special issue on coping and personality. It first presents a historical overview of the psychological study of how people cope with stress and identifies three generations of theory and research: (a) the psychoanalysts and the ego development school, which tended to equate personality and coping strategies; (b) the transactional approach, which appeared in the 1960s and emphasized situational and cognitive influences on coping while downplaying the role of individual differences; and (c) the most recent, "third generation," whose work is represented in this special issue and focuses on the role of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions among coping, personality, appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. This introduction concludes with a discussion of unresolved conceptual and methodological issues and a brief orientation to the third-generation articles that follow in this special issue.     

Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing: Introduction to the Special Issue

This issue of the Journal of Genetic Counseling is devoted to direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. The 15 articles in this special issue address practice considerations for genetic counselors and other health care professionals; the benefits and limitations of DTC genetic testing; consumer and provider attitudes towards and experience with DTC testing; and the roles and educational needs of genetic counselors and other health care providers in providing and interpreting DTC genetic testing. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a brief background on DTC genetic testing, summarize the important contribution of the articles included in this issue, and outline the essential work that still needs to be done as genetic counselors are increasingly engaged in discussions, education, and research about DTC genetic testing.     

Anxiety sensitivity and its impact on pain experiences and conditions: A state of the art

This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy devoted to the topic of anxiety sensitivity (AS) and its impact on pain experiences and conditions. We provide a historical overview of relevant cognitive behavioural models of chronic pain, summarize recent models incorporating the AS construct, and introduce the papers in the special issue. These papers are organized into two sets – basic laboratory‐based investigations and relatively more applied studies. We attempt to highlight some of the most important findings from each of these investigations and studies, in turn. Then, we consider several important conclusions derived from the set of special issue papers and the implications of these for the practice of cognitive‐behavioural interventions with pain populations. Finally, we make several suggestions for directions for future investigations in this burgeoning area of cognitive behavioural research and practice.     

Anxiety sensitivity and its impact on pain experiences and conditions: a state of the art

This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy devoted to the topic of anxiety sensitivity (AS) and its impact on pain experiences and conditions. We provide a historical overview of relevant cognitive behavioural models of chronic pain, summarize recent models incorporating the AS construct, and introduce the papers in the special issue. These papers are organized into two sets--basic laboratory-based investigations and relatively more applied studies. We attempt to highlight some of the most important findings from each of these investigations and studies, in turn. Then, we consider several important conclusions derived from the set of special issue papers and the implications of these for the practice of cognitive-behavioural interventions with pain populations. Finally, we make several suggestions for directions for future investigations in this burgeoning area of cognitive behavioural research and practice.     

Cognitive approaches to the study of episodic future thinking

The concept of episodic future thinking—the ability to simulate events that may take place in the personal future—has given rise to an exponentially growing field of research that spans a variety of sub-disciplines within psychology and neuroscience. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a brief historical overview of factors that have shaped research on the topic and highlight the need for additional behavioural work to uncover cognitive mechanisms that support episodic future thinking and differentiate it from other related modes of future-oriented cognition. We conclude by discussing the manner in which the various contributions to the special issue fill the gaps in our knowledge and make some of our own suggestions for future work.