Translational research: how social psychology can improve psychotherapy

In an effort to generate innovative treatments, the National Institute of Mental Health has made translational research for alleviating mental illness a major funding priority. Although translational research is a powerful approach for moving basic science findings into novel treatments, it remains ambiguous and rarely implemented in psychology. The current article describes conceptual and methodological issues involved with translational research, including considerations about time frame, scope of hypothesis tested, dose of treatment, contraindication, and sampling. Translational concepts and methods are illustrated with areas of social psychology that are promising for translation into solutions for pressing questions in psychotherapy research.     

Paradigms in the study of creativity: Introducing the perspective of cultural psychology

This article identifies three paradigms in creativity theory and research in psychology. The He-paradigm, focused on the solitary genius, has been followed, mainly after the 1950s, by the I-paradigm, equally individualistic in nature but attributing creativity to each and every individual. Extending this view, the We-paradigm incorporates what became known as the social psychology of creativity. The cultural psychology of creativity builds upon this last theoretical approach while being critical of some of its assumptions. This relatively new perspective, using the conceptual and methodological framework of cultural psychology, investigates the sociocultural roots and dynamics of all our creative acts and employs a tetradic framework of self - community - new artifact - existing artifacts in its conceptualization of creativity. The theoretical basis of the cultural psychology approach is analyzed as well as some of its main implications for both the understanding and study of creativity.     

Family resilience: a developmental systems framework

Abstract

This article presents a brief overview of a family resilience conceptual framework, grounded in a multi-level developmental systems orientation. A family systems perspective broadens attention to resources for individual resilience throughout the family network of relationships. The concept of family resilience refers to the family as a functional system, impacted by highly stressful events and social contexts, and in turn, facilitating the positive adaptation of all members and strengthening the family unit. A research-informed map of key processes in family resilience is outlined, highlighting the recursive and synergistic influences of transactional processes within families and with their social environment. Varied process elements may be more or less useful, depending on different adverse situations over time, with a major crisis, trauma, or loss; disruptive transitions; or chronic multi-stress conditions. This perspective is attuned to the diversity of family cultures and structures, their resources and constraints, salient socio-cultural and developmental influences, and the viability of varied pathways in resilience.     

Positive Indicators of Child Well-Being: A Conceptual Framework, Measures, and Methodological Issues

This article suggests a comprehensive conceptual framework which identifies constructs for positive well-being as well as potential indicators and extant measures that fit with those constructs. In addition, the article reviews existing data sources for examples of positive measures that are found in the proposed framework as well as research studies that have been successful in measuring these indicators. The article then notes the data and measurement gaps that exist in comprehensively measuring the positive in children and youth. Finally, it identifies a number of conceptual and methodological issues that need consideration as efforts to define and measure positive indicators of well-being and well-becoming go forward. We argue that positive indicators represent good science, reflect and promote a positive vision of children, and establish positive goals for nations.     

Family resilience: a framework for clinical practice

This article presents an overview of a family resilience framework developed for clinical practice, and describes its advantages. Drawing together findings from studies of individual resilience and research on effective family functioning, key processes in family resilience are outlined in three domains: family belief systems, organizational patterns, and communication/problem-solving. Clinical practice applications are described briefly to suggest the broad utility of this conceptual framework for intervention and prevention efforts to strengthen families facing serious life challenges.     

Pathways Between Social Support,Family Well Being,Quality of Parenting,and Child Resilience: What We Know

We contribute to the theoretical and research knowledge base regarding the pathways between parental social support, family well being, quality of parenting, and the development of child resilience in families with a child with serious emotional problems. Little conceptual development has been done that provides a theoretical framework for studying the relationships among these variables. We identify key findings from social support theory and research, including the impact of social support on family well being and the parents’ capacity to parent, and the experience of parental social support in families with a child with a disability. We review the constructs of family well being, quality of parenting, and child resilience. Further, we explain the pathways between parental social support, family well being, quality of parenting, and child resilience in families with a child with serious emotional problems. Key variables of the model and the nature of their inter-relationships are described. Social support is constructed as a protective mechanism with main and buffering effects that can impact family well being, quality of parenting, and child resilience at a number of junctures. The conceptual model’s implications for future theory development and research are discussed.     

基于文化的心理复原力研究

随着对个体心理复原力研究不断深入,文化作为影响个体心理复原力的重要因素日益受到关注,研究者在厘清文化与复原力之间的关系后,尝试以积极心理学的视角,将中国传统文化中"天人合一"、"以人为本"、"自强不息"、"厚德载物"等文化精神引入到个体心理复原力发展的过程中,为个体心理复原力的研究贡献价值。     

Comment on “The Self‐Care of Psychologists and Mental Health Professionals” (Dattilio, 2015)

Professor Frank Dattilio's article “The Self‐care of Psychologists and Mental Health Professionals” provides an overview of stress and related mental health problems among psychologists, and a proposition that psychologists are not vigilant in regard to self‐care. Dattilio offers a range of self‐care strategies and recommendations, and highlights self‐care practices within various psychology frameworks, and concludes with some “healthy tips” for managing stress. In my commentary I underscore Dattilio's message that self‐care is of critical importance in psychology practice, given the responsibility of caring for others inherent in the work psychologists undertake. However, I raise additional points of consideration and suggest an alternative approach to addressing the self‐care needs of the profession. My commentary makes the following points: (a) the need to distinguish between psychology trainees and practising qualified psychologists when addressing stress and self‐care requirements in the profession; (b) the importance of developing a culture of self‐care among psychologists by providing self‐care instruction during training; (c) the need to temper research findings on stress and mental health among psychologists by the methodological weakness of the studies in this area; (d) adhering to the recent call from colleagues to shift from a focus on pathology and punishment to a positive acceptance, mindfulness, and values‐based approach for encouraging self‐care among psychologists; (e) the use of a systematic framework for organising the presentation of self‐care strategies that makes them more accessible; and (f) an appeal to professional bodies to take their responsibility in promoting self‐care in the profession.     

青少年心理韧性量表的编制和效度验证

心理韧性（resilience）是积极心理学的热点课题。虽然国外已有很多测量工具,但在中国群体中的适用性未得到支持。基于心理韧性的过程模型,通过访谈法开发适合我国青少年群体的心理韧性测量工具。通过访谈25名经历过较大负性生活事件而又适应良好的中学生,编制出100个题目,在283名青少年中初测,通过项目鉴别度分析和探索性因素分析,保留了27个题目,包含目标专注、情绪控制、积极认知、家庭支持和人际协助五个因子,α均大于0.7。复测样本包含420名青少年,验证性因素分析支持了量表的结构效度,二阶因素分析发现前3个因子属于个人力,后2个因子属于支持力。以其他心理韧性量表（RS）和中学生生存质量为关联效标,皮尔逊相关分别为0.53和0.49,支持了量表的外部效度。文章最后讨论了我国青少年心理韧性结构的文化意义及量表的应用范围     

Agency,Thought, and Language: Analytic Philosophy Goes to School

I take as my starting point recent concerns from within educational psychology about the need to treat the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of empirical research in the field more seriously, specifically in the context of work on the self, mind and agency. Developing this theme, I find such conceptual support in the writings of P. F. Strawson and Donald Davidson, two giants of analytic philosophy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Drawing particularly on Davidson’s later work, in which he seeks to integrate key claims about subjectivity, objectivity, belief, truth and knowledge, within what he refers to as a triangular framework of two speakers and a common world, I find support for pedagogic and classroom organizational structures based on collaborative thinking and dialogue. While Davidson did not write about education, I argue that his framework has much to offer, most particularly in view of the priority it affords language and dialogue as the necessary and sufficient conditions for reason, belief and thought—in short, for being a person in the world.     

Adding ‘Flock’ to ‘Fight and Flight’: A Honeycomb of Resilience Where Supply of Relationships Meets Demand for Support

In this article I explain how solidarity can support positive adjustment, collective in nature, where people face chronic, cumulative stress and largely lack resources. I propose that when individuals use relationships as a way to access and mobilise resources, an enabling ecology is configured to foster positive adjustment. Applying a collectivist, transactional-ecological view of resilience I propose Relationship-Resourced Resilience (RRR) as a generative theory to explain how resilience occurs as collective, rather than individual and subjective processes. To do this, I draw on eight years of longitudinal case study data that were generated using a Participatory Reflection and Action (PRA) approach with partnership schools (N = 12, primary = 9, secondary = 3; urban = 9, rural = 3) and teachers (N = 74, female = 63, male = 11). The RRR model posits that, when under threat of chronic stress in a poverty setting, a collective response is to flock (rather than fight or flight). Flock entails a process of alone-standing individuals, experiencing shared and persistent burdens, connecting to access, share, mobilise and sustain use of resources for positive adaptation. RRR extends current resilience views of subjective, individual adjustment to individually reported stress in the direction of resilience as collective experiences of continual stress with subsequent collective positive adaptation.     

Reflexivity,self-identity and resilience in career development: hints from a qualitative research study in Italy

One of the most typical features characterising modern ways of living and working is represented by the dynamism required by individuals in navigating their career paths. This article explores some case studies of career development collected through biographical interviews carried out within the Italian strand of the Cedefop project. These relate to individuals showing different levels of career dynamism (from very active micro-entrepreneurs up to subjects who had to give up their career-related aspirations because of disabilities). They demonstrate, powerfully, three main drivers of career development: reflexivity, self-identity and resilience. Some theoretical references regarding such drivers are here briefly taken into account through a specific conceptual framework. Where the case studies hint at these drivers, and allude to the role played by career guidance, extracts are presented verbatim. In the concluding section, the need for new further research in this field is emphasised, both at the theoretical and at the empirical level.     

The twelfth Bartlett memorial lecture: The role of single neurons in the psychology of perception

I feel deeply honoured by your invitation to give the Bartlett lecture, and am especially glad to do so in Holland, the home of so many distinguished psychologists of sensation and perception. And there is a third reason why it has given me much pleasure, for Sir Frederick Bartlett was one of those who had an important influence on the direction of my career some 40 years ago. I had to decide whether to spend my last year at Cambridge reading psychology or physiology, so I attended a short course of introductory lectures he gave in July. About half a dozen of us sat on upright wooden chairs circled around him as he sat in an armchair, smiling benignly. The first thing he did was to tell us to close our notebooks, for he was not going to say anything that would help us to pass any exams. And I believe the very last words of his last lecture were, “So you see it is all very difficult”. I was very glad he said that, for I had in fact found it all very heavy going: my brain seemed always to be lost in clouds of uncertainty when “remembering”, “thinking”, or “perceiving” were mentioned, because there was no conceptual framework for these processes except the words themselves and others spun around them. What I was looking for were the definable quantities of physics, chemistry and even physiology, these I could handle conceptually in their geometric and functional interactions, whereas I always find a purely verbal argument about abstractions difficult to follow and impossible to believe. So this lack of any nonverbal conceptual framework was very painful.

There was one phrase I think I recall him using that particularly aroused my interest-“the effort after meaning”; intuitively this seemed to be very important, but however much effort I made the meaning never quite emerged. I had almost decided that my mistrust of words made me unsuited to a career in psychology, but all the same I put my problem about “physiology or psychology” directly to Bartlett. After finding out that I was mainly interested in problems of sensation and perception, he said he thought that E. D. Adrian's research over the last 20 years had made more difference to that subject than any results obtained from within psychology itself.     

A Re-Examination of Risk and Resilience During Adolescence: Incorporating Culture and Diversity

We consider risk and resilience within the developmental contexts of youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent. Conceptual and definitional issues are explained in terms of the role that culture and diversity play in specifying risk and resilience factors for youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent. We promote a conceptual model of risk and resilience as multidimensional phenomenon. The relevance of culture and diversity in a developmental perspective of youth of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent is discussed in a manner that incorporates community psychology principles.     

Role Development

SUMMARY

In this chapter, I first explain my research stance, which reflects how I became interested in this study, as well as the personal perspective and professional background that I bring to the study, which may clarify how I may hear and listen to the participants and face biases that emerge (Ely et al., 1997; Tedlock, 1995; Van Manen, 1990). Next, I describe the research setting, the participants, and the methods for recruiting the participants. Finally, I outline the research procedures, data collection, data management, analysis, methods to achieve trustworthiness, presentation of the findings, negative analysis, and preparatory study.     

An Ecological Approach to Behavioral Development: Insights From Comparative Psychology

In this article, I review recent work from comparative psychology, highlighting several conceptual and methodological insights drawn from comparative research and exploring their value to an ecological approach to behavioral development. In particular, I consider examples of a major focus of comparative psychology, the search for developmental mechanisms and processes underlying the expression of species-typical behavior. This focus has provided several insights regarding behavioral development that have supported an ecological approach and provided a richness and depth of perspective on behavior complementary to that found in ecological psychology. Specifically, I review the related notions of probabilism, equifinality, nonlinearity, and distributed control and discuss their applicability to and support of ecological theory.     

The Phenomenological Film Collective: Introducing a cinematic‐phenomenological research method for social advocacy filmmaking

This paper introduces the vision for the Phenomenological Film Collective ( pfcollective.com ), a research and filmmaking group which utilizes phenomenological research in the service of social advocacy filmmaking. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of developing a “cinematic‐phenomenological research method” for PFCollective in order to illuminate lived experiences of sociocultural oppression for public viewership via cinematography. The roots of cinematic phenomenology are situated within the theoretical framework of liberation psychology, which calls on psychologists to pursue research that can facilitate consciousness‐raising and social justice across society. The paper provides a methodological overview of existential‐hermeneutic phenomenological research and discusses how its research findings can be disseminated to the widespread public in artistic formats. I demonstrate how filmmaking is an appropriate aesthetic language through which to disseminate phenomenological research about lived experiences of oppression, grounding this proposition in phenomenological philosophy and liberation psychology. I outline the procedural steps for conducting cinematic‐phenomenological research to produce phenomenological films about oppressive sociocultural phenomena. The paper concludes with suggestions for academic disciplines to become more interdisciplinary in our collective pursuit for social advocacy and change.     

The Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC) Conceptual Model to Promote Mental Health for Adolescents with ASD

Despite an increased risk of mental health problems in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is limited research on effective prevention approaches for this population. Funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism, a theoretically and empirically supported school-based preventative model has been developed to alter the negative trajectory and promote wellbeing and positive mental health in adolescents with ASD. This conceptual paper provides the rationale, theoretical, empirical and methodological framework of a multilayered intervention targeting the school, parents and adolescents on the spectrum. Two important interrelated protective factors have been identified in community adolescent samples, namely the sense of belonging (connectedness) to school and the capacity for self and affect regulation in the face of stress (i.e. resilience). We describe how a confluence of theories from social psychology, developmental psychology and family systems theory, along with empirical evidence (including emerging neurobiological evidence), supports the interrelationships between these protective factors and many indices of wellbeing. However, the characteristics of ASD (including social and communication difficulties, and frequently difficulties with changes and transitions, and diminished optimism and self-esteem) impair access to these vital protective factors. The paper describes how evidence-based interventions at the school level for promoting inclusive schools (using the Index for Inclusion) and interventions for adolescents and parents to promote resilience and belonging [using the Resourceful Adolescent Program (RAP)] are adapted and integrated for adolescents with ASD. This multisite proof-of-concept study will confirm whether this multilevel school-based intervention is promising, feasible and sustainable.     

Venturing into the visual voice: combining photos and interviews in phenomenological inquiry around marginalisation and chronic illness

In this article, we present a reflection on the research process of combining photographs with phenomenologically oriented interviews. Two studies in the field of chronic illness with marginalised individuals (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* people living with MS; men diagnosed with breast cancer) are employed to illustrate a range of conceptual, methodological and pragmatic issues. Both studies draw upon an integrative theoretical framework within a critical health psychology epistemological paradigm informed by phenomenological psychology and visual methodologies. The data collected for both studies have been analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). We offer some thoughts regarding certain challenges and opportunities of synergising verbal and visual data and illustrate our arguments through a series of examples from the two studies, which are critically discussed. We argue that qualitative research in psychology benefits from an enhanced multimethodological approach employing existential phenomenological psychology and visual methodologies, especially when exploring chronic illness in marginalised communities, and we outline benefits for the wider community of qualitative researchers in psychology.