Section for the Promotion of Psychotherapy Science – March 2016

2016 APA Roundtable and 2015 Roundtable Recap 

Greetings from the Section for the Promotion of Psychotherapy Science! We are excited to announce that our 2016 Roundtable discussion at the American Psychological Association convention in Denver will have as its theme “Promotion of Multicultural Psychotherapy Science: What do we have to learn? What do we have to offer?”  Wonjin Sim of Chatham University will chair the roundtable, and a variety of multicultural psychotherapy scholars, including Changming Duan, Derald Sue, Jairo Fuertes, Karen Tao, Stephanie Budge, and Jesse Owen, among others, will be engaging in the discussion.

Last year’s roundtable discussion for our section, “Sharing Wisdom – Doing Therapy While Doing Research on Therapy,” was a tremendously exciting exchange of ideas among early, mid-career, and prominent counselor-researchers. In fact, previous SPPS chair, Jill Paquin, is organizing a series of articles to extend and elaborate the discussion begun at APA 2015, and a variety of authors interested in how and why we combine counseling and research careers are working on contributions to this series. Expect a Consensual Qualitative Research analysis and a content map of the 2015 roundtable discussion, a narrative from a senior scholar of the challenges and opportunities she has seen combining counseling and research over a long career, and a survey of counseling psychologists about their experiences combining research and practice. We hope you’ll join us for this year’s roundtable discussion, which promises to be equally rich and exciting, as well as keeping an eye out for the special series of articles extending last year’s discussion. 

Student Award Seeking Nominations

We will also present our Student Award as well as our Lifetime Achievement Award to a prominent psychotherapy scientist at this year’s roundtable. Therefore, we are also pleased to announce our annual student award competition. Nominations will be accepted until May 2, 2016 for an undergraduate or graduate student who has first-authored a completed research project on some aspect of psychotherapy science. The research must have been completed, published, or presented at a conference no earlier than January 1, 2015. (Graduated students are also eligible provided they were students when the research was completed, published, or presented.) Award nominations should include (a) a letter discussing the merits of the project from a counseling psychologist who has served as the student’s advisor (on the project and/or on the student’s degree), and (b) a 500-1000 word abstract of the completed study OR a copy of the published manuscript or conference paper OR a copy of a manuscript submitted to a conference or journal for review. (Please DO NOT send dissertations.) The award includes a $250 prize to help defray costs of travel to the APA convention. Submit nominations via email only (no snail mail nominations) to me at [email protected].

Interdivisional Symposium on Group Therapy at APA 2016 

Also in Denver our section is presenting an interdivisional symposium (with Division 49, Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy and Division 35, Psychology of Women) entitled Group Therapy in a Diverse, Global Society: A Tool for Meaningful Change. This symposium will explore the social justice beginnings of group therapy with a historical review by Ruth Fassinger, as well as discuss current research across settings, problems, and populations, with a special focus on feminist and size-acceptance interventions. We hope everyone will join us for this fascinating symposium as well.