Cultivating Community Psychology for Future Generations: Symbiosis,Synergy, and Separation

As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of a community psychology division of the American Psychological Association, there are reasons to be concerned about the sustainability of the field. This commentary proposes a need for deliberate, systematic efforts to cultivate settings that can sustain the field. A framework for outreach to build symbiotic relationships and synergistic collaborations with persons who do not identify as community psychologists is proposed. Simultaneously, a strategy of separation from other disciplines may be needed in some circumstances to conserve settings that sustain the field. Finding a balance in these strategies is necessary to cultivate community psychology for future generations.     

Child-oriented family therapy in China: A cross-cultural application of integrative family therapy targeting children aged 4–10

This article describes child-oriented family therapy (COF), a family therapy approach to early psychological and behavioral problems that is widely applied in northern Europe and has been adopted by countries with different cultures, such as Germany and China. This article explains the theoretical background, setting, characteristics, development and effective factors of this method and explores relevant research. In addition, the application of this method in China and reflections on its applicability to families in different cultures are presented. A clinical case is provided to illustrate the core therapeutic principles of COF. Since the application of COF interventions to families with children in Asian cultures remains understudied, the widespread availability of COF and adaptation to local conditions could facilitate training and research achievements in this field.     

Examining multiple feature evaluation and classification methods for improving the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease

An accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease by specialists involves many neurological, psychological and physical examinations. The specialists investigate a number of symptoms and signs when examining the nervous system conditions of a person. The diagnosis involves reviewing the medical history and genetic factor of the person. The recent diagnosis methodology to Parkinson’s disease relies on voice disorders analysis. This methodology entails extracting feature sets of a recorded person’s voice then utilizing a machine learning technique to identify the healthy and Parkinson’s cases from the voice. This paper attempts to improve the diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease by testing multiple feature evaluation and classification machine learning methods based on the voice disorders analysis. The aim of this paper is to find the optimal solution to the problem by (i) proposing a new Multiple Feature Evaluation Approach (MFEA) of a multi-agent system (ii) implementing five independent classification schemas which are Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, Neural Network, Random Forests, and Support Vector Machine on the Parkinson’s diagnosis before and after applying the MFEA, and (iii) evaluating the diagnosis accuracy of the results. The methodology of the tests encompasses 10-fold cross-validation to evaluate the learning of methods and track variation in their performance. The test results show that the MFEA of the multi-agent system finds the best set of features and improves the performance of the classifiers. The average rate of improvement in the diagnostic accuracy of the classifiers are Decision Tree 10.51%, Naïve Bayes 15.22%, Neural Network 9.19%, Random Forests 12.75%, and Support Vector Machine 9.13%. These results show that the MFEA makes a significant improvement to the classifiers’ diagnosis results.     

‘We’ve shared a lifetime with one another’: using reflective visual/verbal journals to develop graduate student relationships

The success of graduate students relies on factors beyond mere cognitive ability, with fostering peer and professional relationships as definitive influences on achievement. Research shows that positive faculty/student relationships are a significant factor in the success of graduate students and that art-making is an effective way to encourage the reflective thinking needed to nurture these relationships. In this article, we examine the relationship between arts informed pedagogy, specifically the use of a visual/verbal journal, and the formation of graduate relationships. The majority of the students in this collaborative inquiry entered their doctoral program at the same time the research class began and all engaged in an artfully imagined introduction to qualitative research course.     

Parent-School and Community Partnerships in Children's Mental Health: Networking Challenges, Dilemmas, and Solutions

Inter-agency collaboration, service coordination, and the creation of successful partnerships among parents, teachers, and human services professionals continues to be a challenge for the development of responsive community-based systems of care for at-risk youth and their families. We explore how one inner-city neighborhood struggles to create successful community partnerships through traditional networking strategies. Our findings identify networking strategies that appear to work and those that do not. Recommendations for improving communication are provided.     

Majority merging by adaptive counting

The present paper introduces a belief merging procedure by majority using the standard format of Adaptive Logics. The core structure of the logic ADM ^c (Adaptive Doxastic Merging by Counting) consists in the formulation of the conflicts arising from the belief bases of the agents involved in the procedure. A strategy is then defined both semantically and proof-theoretically which selects the consistent contents answering to a majority principle. The results obtained are proven to be equivalent to a standard majority operator for bases with partial support.     

Reasoning about cooperation,actions and preferences

In this paper, a logic for reasoning about coalitional power is developed which explicitly represents agents’ preferences and the actions by which the agents can achieve certain results. A complete axiomatization is given and its satisfiability problem is shown to be decidable and EXPTIME-hard.     

Building Collaborative Capacity in Community Coalitions: A Review and Integrative Framework

This article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of 80 articles, chapters, and practitioners' guides focused on collaboration and coalition functioning. The purpose of this review was to develop an integrative framework that captures the core competencies and processes needed within collaborative bodies to facilitate their success. The resulting framework for building collaborative capacity is presented. Four critical levels of collaborative capacity—member capacity, relational capacity, organizational capacity, and programmatic capacity—are described and strategies for building each type are provided. The implications of this model for practitioners and scholars are discussed.     

Academic on a mission: Run and run and run

Challenges the distinctions we make between research/scholarship and practice. Recognizes and values the complimentarity of teaching, research, practice, and public policy. Tells how I have tried to approach creating opportunities to integrate those activities in my role as a community psychologist in an academic setting. Describes some of the lessons I have learned from my two decades of practice. This article is a very close approximation to my Distinguished Contribution to Practice in Community Psychology award address at APA in Toronto, August 1996. That talk included numerous overheads, which reason demands I omit. I thank Jim Sorenson and George Albee who, each in their own way, showed me that university professors can be passionate about their work and extend their reach beyond the perimeters of the campus. I thank Heather Barton, Krista Hopkins, Jennifer Heigel, and Anne Salassi for being such good ambassadors and for my most meaningful source of professional satisfaction: turning students on to careers as community psychologists and preventionists. I thank the Virginia prevention community for two decades of working together toward a common mission and the College of William and Mary for supporting my life’s work. Finally I thank John Morgan for his friendship and his affirming introduction, State Michaels for her help with the original talk, and Beverly Peterson for always being there. I am deeply honored.