Leaving behind our preparadigmatic past: Professional psychology as a unified clinical science.

Abstract

Acknowledgement:The behavioral and neurosciences have made remarkable progress in the past couple decades. Major advances have been made in understanding a wide range of phenomena, from epigenetics and neural plasticity to the nature of cognition, emotion, consciousness, moral reasoning, social behavior, and culture. Indeed, so much has been learned about human psychology recently that current explanations of many psychological mechanisms and processes are markedly different from those considered current just a generation ago.

Psychological approaches to chronic pain management: where are we coming from and where might we go?

“…Even a rather cursory audit of the available literature yields a very large number of potentially important contender independent variables: coping, beliefs, illness perceptions, somatization, attention, fear, avoidance, hypervigilance, depression, anger, endurance, attachment, childhood experience, goals, pacing, motivation, self, and so on. We have argued elsewhere that such a large number of variables as exist today in psychological studies is unwieldly, not easy for others outside the field to understand, and not easy to use to guide research or treatment designs (15,27,28). Some of the elements in our large variable set are difficult to distinguish from each other and some apparent distinctions are probably unimportant or impractical.…”

Virtue Ethics and Integration in Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology

“…Furthermore, the clinical expert needs epistemic virtues to understand and sometimes confront the fundamental disciplinary uncertainties in psychotherapy research (e.g., nosology, empirical status, research practices, etc.) (Bohart et al, 1998;Westen et al, 2004;Gupta, 2014;Melchert, 2016;Jackson, 2017) and the entanglement of questions of facts and values in psychotherapy (Woolfolk, 2015;Berg and Slaattelid, 2017). This makes the more holistic concept understanding relevant, as opposed to possessing mere factual knowledge (Woolfolk, 2015).…”

A Prática da Avaliação Psicológica em Neuropsicologia e Psicologia do Trânsito Durante Estágio de Formação Profissional

“…Mais do que isto, as práticas profissionais e de ensino da profissão, apoiadas em "tradições teóricas" em psicologia, deveriam ser substituídas por conhecimentos sobre a psicologia humana que fossem fundamentados cientificamente. A "orientação teórica" não deveria sobrepujar a prática baseada em evidências (Melchert, 2016).…”