Innovative Interdisciplinary Tools and Methodologies in Clinical Psychology: How to Promote People’s Health During Uncertain Times

A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2025 | Viewed by 995

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padova, 35131 Padua, Italy
Interests: clinical and applied psychology; emergency management; health; social cohesion; language and sense making; text analysis, machine learning and natural language processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, and maybe more than ever, the human population is facing global challenges of different natures and magnitudes: pandemics, armed conflicts and wars, migration, economic crises, population growth, climate change, and so on. These challenges can, and almost surely already do, undermine people's health and may also question our survival.

Several disciplines have offered their significant contribution to managing these challenges: some examples are chemistry and pharmacology, which have produced effective solutions in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic; or computer science, developing algorithms to speed up the processing of increasingly voluminous databases of human communities-related data.

On par with these disciplines, clinical psychology can and must provide an equally concrete and effective contribution in supporting members of the human community to deal with these uncertain times and the daily challenges they bring with them.

But how can clinical psychology achieve this?

Answering this question requires an interdisciplinary approach, also aligned with the current technological developments, that produces useful and pragmatic responses, i.e., an approach where research and innovations from different fields enhance the effectiveness of the solutions that clinical psychology can offer.

In this way, clinical psychology could increase the precision and legitimacy of its service for individuals and decision makers, as well as the whole human population, providing effective and user-friendly solutions that promote people’s health and cohesion.

Given all the above, this Special Issue aims to involve all those professionals and researchers who see the horizon for the further development of clinical psychology. We invite all those who can offer new and innovative approaches, methodologies, and tools, with expendability in everyday life contexts, that can support individuals, groups, and institutions in dealing with the current uncertain reality and the challenges of our time.

Dr. Lydia Giménez-Llort
Dr. Gian Piero Turchi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • clinical and applied psychology
  • global challenges
  • health and social cohesion
  • emergency management
  • human communities-related data
  • innovation and development
  • IoT, artificial intelligence and machine learning

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

13 pages, 1467 KiB  
Article
Clinical Questions and Psychological Change: How Can Artificial Intelligence Support Mental Health Practitioners?
by Luisa Orrù, Marco Cuccarini, Christian Moro and Gian Piero Turchi
Behav. Sci. 2024, 14(12), 1225; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14121225 - 19 Dec 2024
Viewed by 547
Abstract
Despite their diverse assumptions, clinical psychology approaches share the goal of mental health promotion. The literature highlights their usefulness, but also some issues related to their effectiveness, such as their difficulties in monitoring psychological change. The elective strategy for activating and managing psychological [...] Read more.
Despite their diverse assumptions, clinical psychology approaches share the goal of mental health promotion. The literature highlights their usefulness, but also some issues related to their effectiveness, such as their difficulties in monitoring psychological change. The elective strategy for activating and managing psychological change is the clinical question. But how do different types of questions foster psychological change? This work tries to answer this issue by studying therapist–patient interactions with a ML model for text analysis. The goal was to investigate how psychological change occurs thanks to different types of questions, and to see if the ML model recognized this difference in analyzing patients’ answers to therapists’ clinical questions. The experimental dataset of 14,567 texts was divided based on two different question purposes, splitting answers in two categories: those elicited by questions asking patients to start describing their clinical situation, or those from asking them to detail how they evaluate their situation and mental health condition. The hypothesis that these categories are distinguishable by the model was confirmed by the results, which corroborate the different valences of the questions. These results foreshadow the possibility to train ML and AI models to suggest clinical questions to therapists based on patients’ answers, allowing the increase of clinicians’ knowledge, techniques, and skills. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop