Four Principles for Cultivating Alternate Cultural Paradigms in Psychology: Summary Reflections on Innovative Contributions

Abstract

The contributors to this special issue have demonstrated the potency and promise of cultivating Alternate Cultural Paradigms (ACPs) in psychology that reflect and express the lived realities of non-White communities in America. Based on my past research engagement with several distinct American Indian and First Nations communities, I offer for consideration four principles for psychologists who seek to further cultivate ACPs: (a) attend independently to culture and power, (b) anchor conceptual abstractions in empirical examples, (c) complicate stock oppositions and essentialisms, and (d) integrate emancipation with application. Adoption of these four principles should assist with the development of robust ACPs that accurately reflect the lived experiences of non-White communities. The promotion of these in psychology represents the exciting possibility for a more just and equitable future in which the injuries of White racism are remedied and all Americans are granted equal opportunities to live and thrive in self-determined fashion.

Behavioral health services in Urban American Indian Health Programs: Results from six site visits

“…Findings from this work also indicate that future interventions should balance the potential epistemological and practical contradictions between evidence‐based professional practices and culture‐based healing practices (Gone, 2010, 2015; Hartmann & Gone, 2012). Study designs which equally consider the knowledge and contributions of professional and Indigenous therapeutic approaches, and researchers well‐versed in both, may prove most effective at elucidating the nuanced benefits of each approach, with benefits for AIAN patients (Gone, 2021, 2022). Finally, scaling‐up interventions based on culture and traditional healing in urban AIAN settings must consider significant intertribal variation that can make defining and generalizing such treatments challenging.…”

Opportunities for psychologists to advance health equity: Using liberation psychology to identify key lessons from 17 years of praxis.

“…Communities living with health inequities hold knowledge and traditions that promote resilience and health that many health professionals and academics have long overlooked. There is also a growing call to cultivate alternative cultural paradigms that can advance health equity (Consoli & Myers, 2022; Gone, 2021). The national program office initially did not emphasize the need to partner with patients and communities experiencing health and health care inequities.…”

Acculturation and Psychopathology

“…Additionally, true to the developmental psychopathology perspective, the IP-FAV acknowledges the role of individual differences and person characteristics as acculturation conditions, an understanding that is needed to avoid assumptions about immigrant and/or BIPOC youth as carbon copies of each other who subscribe to all the values and practices of their cultural, ethnic, and racial groups (Causadias 2020). Culture in general, and acculturation in particular, is uniquely experienced, embraced, and/or resisted by each individual (Castañeda et al 2015, Gone 2022.…”