Practicing Community Psychology Through Mixed Methods Participatory Research Designs

Community psychologists address social inequalities and problems by employing ecological principles, multiple methodologies, and participatory approaches to empower individuals, organizations, and communities to organize action and systems change. This article aims to contribute to mixed methods literature by presenting three models of mixed methods participatory research across a variety of geographic and sociocultural contexts. The models outline participatory processes and points of qualitative and quantitative data integration. Challenges related to the interplay between participatory approaches and mixed methods studies as well as implications on social science research are discussed.     

Counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning: some implications for practice

This paper explores counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning. Previous experiences may create distortions in meaning-making perspectives, distortions that create templates for evaluating future experience. These templates act as barriers to being open to experience; thus there is an inability to learn from experience. The process of therapy can provide a learning milieu for the exploration and working through of these barriers, with a potential outcome of a return to learning from experience. It is suggested here that intrinsic to the learning milieu created in therapy there are elements of significant, transformative and emotional learning. Therapy is thus a reparative discourse that facilitates a return to learning from experience. A deconstruction of this concept is provided here as a way of developing the exploration of counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning.     

The lived experience of psychotherapists working with older clients: an heuristic study

This paper presents the results of an heuristic study based on the research question: ‘How do psychotherapists experience working with older clients?’ The question came from the researchers’ experience and interest in working with older clients in general practice. It started from the researchers’ desire to examine more closely feelings and elements present in their own experience in dialogue with seven other practising therapists who had an interest and experience of working with this client group. Qualities and elements identified were: perceptions of old age and ageism; boundaries and settings; changes to practice; culture and experiences; awareness of time; loss; decline and mortality; and parents and children. These are illustrated by material from each of the participants, a composite depiction of the experience, a creative synthesis and examples from the researchers’ experiences.     

RSK2 signaling in brain habenula contributes to place aversion learning

RSK2 is a Ser/Thr kinase acting in the Ras/MAPK pathway. Rsk2 gene deficiency leads to the Coffin-Lowry Syndrome, notably characterized by cognitive deficits. We found that mrsk2 knockout mice are unable to associate an aversive stimulus with context in a lithium-induced conditioned place aversion task requiring both high-order cognition and emotional processing. Virally mediated shRNA-RSK2 knockdown in the habenula, whose involvement in cognition is receiving increasing attention, also ablated contextual conditioning. RSK2 signaling in the habenula, therefore, is essential for this task. Our study reveals a novel role for RSK2 in cognitive processes and uncovers the critical implication of an intriguing brain structure in place aversion learning.     

High-fat diets impair spatial learning in the radial-arm maze in mice

It has been suggested that hyperglycemia and insulin resistance triggered by energy-dense diets can account for hippocampal damage and deficits of cognitive behaviour. We wonder if the impairment of learning and memory processes detected in diet-induced obese (DIO) mice is linked to diet composition itself. With this purpose we have evaluated learning performance in mice undergoing a short-term high-fat (HF) treatment, which leads to a pre-obese state characterized by increased adiposity without significant changes of glucose and insulin plasma levels. C57BL/6J mice were fed either a HF (45 kcal% from fat) or control diet (10 kcal% from fat) during 8 weeks. Learning performance was evaluated by using the four-arm baited version of the eight-arm radial maze test (RAM). Mice were trained to learn the RAM protocol and then memory was tested at different time-points. Time spent to consume food placed in baited arms and errors committed to find them were measured in all sessions. DIO mice significantly spent more time in learning the task and made a greater number of errors than controls. Moreover, retention tests revealed that both working and total memory errors were also more numerous in DIO mice. The current results show that short-term DIO impairs spatial learning and suggest that impairment of hippocampal learning elicited by HF diets might be perceptible before metabolic alterations linked to obesity develop.     

Stimulus complexity and prospective timing: clues for a parallel process model of time perception

Whereas many studies have considered the role of attention in prospective timing, fewer have established relations between movement complexity and prospective timing. The present study aims at assessing to what extent motion complexity interferes with prospective timing and at delineating a neuropsychophysical plausible model. We have thus designed a visual paradigm presenting stimuli in sequential pairs (reference comparison interval). Stimuli are motionless or moving according to different complexities, and stimulus complexities are intermixed within each pair. To prevent a possible attention-sharing effect, no concurrent task was required. Our study suggests that movement complexity is a key component of duration perception, and that the relative judgement of durations depends on spatio-temporal features of stimuli. In particular, it shows that movement complexity can bias subjects’ perception and performance, and that subjects detect that comparison intervals are longer than reference before their end. In the discussion, we advocate that the classical internal clock model cannot easily account for our results. Consequently, we propose a model for time perception, based on a parallel processing between comparison interval perception and the reconstruction of the reference duration.     

Change detection evokes a Simon-like effect

The present experiment studied choice response context effects on the programming of response sequences using behavioural and electrophysiological methods. Participants were asked to produce responses differing in sequence length (1-key vs. 3-key responses) with either their left or right hand in a choice reaction time (RT) task. The choice response context was manipulated by a blocked or mixed execution of 1-key and 3-key responses. A sequence length effect on RT was observed in the blocked but not in the mixed condition. The time course of the lateralized readiness potential indicates a motoric locus of the sequence length effect, suggesting that the response hand is activated before the entire motor program is established.     

On the relations between action planning, object identification, and motor representations of observed actions and objects

Recent evidence suggests that viewing a static prime object (a hand grasp), can activate action representations that affect the subsequent identification of graspable target objects. The present study explored whether stronger effects on target object identification would occur when the prime object (a hand grasp) was made more action-rich and dynamic. Of additional interest was whether this type of action prime would affect the generation of motor activity normally elicited by the target object. Three experiments demonstrated that grasp observation improved the identification of grasp-congruent target objects relative to grasp-incongruent target objects. We argue from this data that identifying a graspable object includes the processing of its action-related attributes. In addition, grasp observation was shown to influence the motor activity elicited by the target object, demonstrating interplay between action-based and object-based motor coding.