THE BEYOND THE CONTROVERSIA ON RESEARCH IN PSYCHOLOGY:
THE NEW LOOK OF PSYCHOSOCIAL AND CULTURAL GENOMICS
Di MAURO COZZOLINO
During the last years there has been increased
discussion about the reliability of psychological
research. Criticism has been activated not only
because of many important cases of scientific fraud,
but also because of numerous failures to replicate
previous scientific findings.
We can consider the recent findings of the
“Reproducibility Project” as the largest effort
to replicate published research in psychology.
Researchers selected 100 papers published in
prominent psychological journals and found that
only 39 could be replicated.
All that increased skepticism about the way
psychologists conduct research studies. These
critiques on failures to replicate many highprofile
studies have been used for proclaiming a
“replication crisis” in psychology.
When several cases of published research cannot be
reproduced by independent and objective scholars,
then it is honest asking the meaning and value of
our discipline. These evidences are legitimizing the
popular notion of psychology as a “soft and fragile
science”.
Of course the impact of this issue for psychological
research on public well-being is grave. Repeated
failures to replicate published research
are producing low trust in our work and in
recommendations we offer to the society and the
whole scientific community.
For example, our patients ask healthcare
providers recommendations based on solid and
empirical evidence. Similarly, teachers and school
administrators need to receive teaching and
learning strategies that are validated in the best
possible way. Psychology and Psychotherapy
need to invest time and energy in strategies and
methodologies based on objective and reproducible
research. This situation needs our attention forcing
our field of study to improve the way we conduct
the research but it doesn’t necessarily suggest that
psychological science has become less rigorous. It is
interesting to see what happens in other scientific
fields. We know that psychology is not the only scientific
discipline in the midst of a replication crisis in fact
some evidence suggests that reproducibility of
research in cancer biology is quite poor and that the
failure to replicate does not affect only psychology.
The same problems of replicability and bias can be
found in the fields of medicine and the life sciences.
An interesting study by Harry Collins reported
how physicists in the UK and US failed to replicate
experiments by Russian scientists. When Russian
and western scientists could work together they
discovered that what they had taken as an irrelevant
aspect of the experimental set-up had been crucial
for the results the Russians obtained. But although
we know all that, the question is trying to explain
why so much psychological research fails the test of
reproducibility.
Experiments may work for reasons the
experimenters did not appreciate so the studies are
right, but not for the reasons given. It has important
consequences for explaining why some things from
lab are not translated into successful treatments.
This is the reason why the “Replication Movement”
suggests that researchers should clearly
communicate every detail of their methodology and
if possible have an experimental protocol register
before publication.
I think that the reasons of this real or presumed crisis
are many and also caused by the complexity of this
field of study. Here I will try to go beyond the typical
discussion regarding the fact if psychology is a good
science or not and if psychological research is really
acceptable. I want to try opening our mind to a new
look on our mind-body functioning and the way to
do research about it.
I don’t want to provide a definitive answer to such
complex reasons staying back to “Replication
Crisis” in Psychology but rather introducing you the
issue from the new perspective of “Psychosocial
and Cultural Genomics” which was born just for
overcoming the epistemological, scientific and
methodological limits Psychology showed during
the last 30-40 years. Of course I confirm the importance of replication,
and standardized experimental and statistical
procedures, but I am aware that Psychology needs
more than this to overcome the issue making itself
more robust, repeatable, and transparent for the first
time in history. So, on the one side we can say that
we are in a crisis but on the other side there is no
better time to be a research psychologist than now.
This is true because there is a great revolution in
many fields of study like neuroscience, biology and
technology applied to the study of human beings.
Recently, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman says,
“Authors, whose work and reputation are at stake,
should have the right to participate as advisers
in the replication of their research.” “Experimental
instructions are commonly paraphrased in the
methods section, although their wording and even
the font in which they are printed are known to
be significant.”He says that the method sections
published are generally too vague to be repeated by
others without the authors.
The discussion regarding all that or the tendency to
publish only positive findings is not new and it has
been discussed by Rosenthal, several decades ago,
also if these problems have been exacerbated in
recent years.
I don’t know the right response but I think that every
crisis is good to grow up and probably this explains
the reasons of this internal and external strange
debate.
When a human being is in a crisis and we support
him, after that he is able to generate something
good and positive. So I want to see the replication
crisis in psychology or the absence of therapeutic
improvements in psychotherapy in the last 40 years
like a natural stage of our creative process prior to
reaching a new evolution as a science.
Of course many internal and external problems have
limited psychological science’s penetration into
public knowledge and its impact with policymakers
and other scientists.
It seems clear that for psychology to advance to
the next level can be an extraordinary possibility
to transform itself making it in a good chance to
generate new theory and responses on our mindbody
functioning and healing for scientific and
social community. Otherwise psychological science
has the opportunity to become leader in finding
better ways to overcome bias and error helping the
entire science.
A conclusion to solve this issue is premature but
in order to better understand their fundamental
mechanisms we could also use the example of
testing the efficacy of a specific treatment in
psychotherapy or in mind-body medicine.
For example, when you want an exact replication
of a study for demonstrating the efficacy of a drug
or psychological intervention, the main issue is
that they work and that they have no negative side
effects.
Psychology and in particular psychotherapy found
Otherwise psychological science
has the opportunity to become leader in finding
better ways to overcome bias and error helping the
entire science.
A conclusion to solve this issue is premature but
in order to better understand their fundamental
mechanisms we could also use the example of
testing the efficacy of a specific treatment in
psychotherapy or in mind-body medicine.
For example, when you want an exact replication
of a study for demonstrating the efficacy of a drug
or psychological intervention, the main issue is
that they work and that they have no negative side
effects.
Psychology and in particular psychotherapy found
many difficulties in gaining credibility and diffusion
in the fields of health and research, not only for
the above mentioned factors but also because the
comparison with other close disciplines such as
medicine always made us losers.
We tried to imitate in a clumsy way research
methodologies of other disciplines or we used
methods that did not give credibility and reliability
to the extremely important and useful things that
research in psychology and psychotherapy actually
does.
The success of psychology on a scientific level
contemplates a bidirectional perspective on an
organism’s functioning: either a top-down view, how
the mind acts on the brain and the gene expression,
and an inverse bottom-up path where the protein
synthesis modifies brain, body and subsequently
mind and behavior.
Of course in order to do research under this new
integrated and multilevel perspective we need
to use research methodologies that come from
other disciplines and use different languages and
procedures.
Therefore the psychosocial genomics gives us the
possibility to overcome or reduce the limits of the
“Replication Crisis” or the difficulties of translating
research into effective and evidence based
treatments, helping at the same time to overcome
the limits of other disciplines such as medicine
and biology. Thanks to psychosocial genomics we
can take advantage of an integrated perspective
on our functioning and of complex methods of
data collection and analysis that inevitably won’t
be exclusively constituted of items, questions and/
or observations like a certain type of psychological
research does.
You can find below a brief description of this new
perspective in psychology and psychotherapy
proposed in 2002 (Rossi, 2002; Cozzolino et al., 2015)
in order to try and reduce some epistemological and
methodological mistakes that psychology kept on
doing even though they were already evident since
almost 40 years.
Genomic represents a new way of conceiving the
way the human being works and its health, illness
and treatment overcoming the separation of mind
and body
It has developed an integrated multilevel model
for the analysis and explanation of behavior.
Simultaneously it represents a simple and complex
model because while it operates on many different
levels it works using simple protocols easy to learn.
The Psychosocial and Cultural Genomics Perspective
reflects the natural functions of our bodies as well
as its innate healing processes (homeostasis and
negative entropy) and it is an interdisciplinary
research method articulated on several layers of
analysis. This new look in Psychology adopts an
integrated and multilevel methodology to explain
the human behavior. So we launch to overcome
exclusively intra-disciplinary theoretical models
for reaching a new, unified vision of medicine,
psychology, biology and quantum physics placing
analysis on different levels: cultural, social, mental
and corporeal in its many cerebral dimensions,
biological, genomic and proteomics.
The first difference from traditional look in
psychology and psychotherapy is that apparently
psychosocial and cultural genomic works only
on psychological level while it is activating and
changing deeply the genomic level. So it represents
a psychotherapy totally oriented on mind-body
healing. In fact, we strongly believed in the Classical
Mind/Gene Communication Cycle of Molecular
Biology with the more recent bioinformatic and
consciousness studies.
The top circle shows that research at this top level
of consciousness explores the Novelty-Numinosum-
Neurogenesis-Expectancy Effect as an adaptive
complex motivational system. The subjective
experience of Novelty evokes highly motivating
experiences of the Numinosum (fascination,
mysteriousness, and tremendousness) that turns
on gene expression, Neurogenesis and Expectancy
in psychotherapy and therapeutic hypnosis (Rossi,
2012).
We now propose that the use of DNA microarray
technology to measure the expression levels of
many thousands of genes simultaneously (Bar-
Joseph et al., 2012) generally using for validatingpersonalized medicine also can be used to assess
the psychosocial genomic validity and reliability of
psychotherapy and many diverse cultural, historical
and holistic traditions of mind-body healing.
The primary research literature of psychosocial
genomics today brings together a variety of topdown
psychotherapeutic processes. They include the
relaxation response (Dusek et al., 2008); therapeutic
hypnosis (Cozzolino, et al., 2015; Rossi, et. al,, 2008;
Lichtenberg et al., 2000, 2004; Rossi, 2012; Rossi &
Rossi, 2013); meditation (Creswell et al., 2012); the
therapeutic placebo (Sliwinski and Elkins, 2013);
social psychology (Cole, 2009, Cole et al., 2005, 2007,
2010, 2011), and yoga (Lavretsky et al., 2013). The
motivation all psychosocial genomic research to
facilitate the resolution of stress related dysfunctions
(Unternaehrer et al., 2012; Yount & Rachlin, 2014).
We mentored the use of DNA microarrays, for
example, to explore the hypothesis that such topdown
therapeutic protocols, epitomized by The
Psychosocial Genomic Healing Experience (CPGHE),
is the scientific foundation of a more general theory
of mind-body communication and healing with
therapeutic hypnosis (Cozzolino et al., 2014; 2015).
A full description of the administration, scoring and
clinical application of the top-down CPGHE protocol
in therapeutic hypnosis is freely available (Rossi,
2012).
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