Call for papers - Special edition of Counselling Psychology Review focusing on Positive Psychology and Counselling Psychology

Counselling Psychology Review

1^st CALL FOR PAPERS: 2015: 1^st CALL FOR PAPERS: 2015

Special Edition focusing upon POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY and counselling psychology

We would like to dedicate a future edition of Counselling Psychology Review to the above theme. One of the British Psychological Society’s current themes involves a focus on ‘Health and Well-Being’. We encounter these concepts very frequently in our practice settings where they may have become associated with their polar opposites, e.g. ‘health’ if not defined as ‘the absence of illness’ is often a mere euphemism which stands for ‘illness’ (see people’s associations with the term ‘mental health’), and the notion of ‘well-being’ is often brought up when service users in fact appear to suffer from a poor quality of life. The special edition on positive psychology can therefore be seen as a response to the perceived need of making such terms meaningful and useful again.

One of the distinguishing features of counselling psychology internationally has been its emphasis on growth and well-being rather than disease and symptom reduction, on prevention and resilience rather than ‘cure’. However, despite having taken a holistic rather than a reductive and deficiency-based stance towards clients, counselling psychologists increasingly work in medicalised environments which require diagnostic categorisation of specific ‘pathologies’ that are seen to reside within the individual seeking help, thus occluding the developmental and creative potential, the strengths and resources that may be available to the client. Positive psychology as a recent movement within academic psychology, which has its roots in humanistic psychology and is concerned with human flourishing, has attempted to redress this imbalance by focusing its research efforts on neglected areas such as gratitude, forgiveness, empathy and compassion, to name just a few. While some have taken issue with the emphasis on the positive due to not wanting such a focus to become collusive with a tendency to close one’s eyes in the face of life’s inevitable losses and tragedies, it should be stressed that positive psychology does not seek to gloss over grim realities; for example, one particularly fruitful area of positive psychological investigation with direct relevance to clinical work has been that of post-traumatic growth.

With the discipline of counselling psychology increasingly seeking to connect and collaborate at an international level, we believe that positive psychological research and practice constitutes an area of overlap for an international discipline of counselling psychology despite its varied expressions in different parts of the world. We therefore invite submissions in the form of research papers, systematic reviews or theoretical papers from the UK and beyond.

The deadlines that we will aim to work to are as follows:

First draft to be submitted by: 30^th November 2014

Peer review completed by: 31st January 2015

Revisions completed by:  28^th February 2015

Sent to publishers: 1^st April 2015

Please also remember that Counselling Psychology Review is always looking for new papers in line with its inclusion criteria.  This includes original research papers, systematic reviews, case studies (within a research frame) and theoretical articles.  Do feel free to submit these at any time in the year.

All the best and we look forward to hearing from you

Edith Steffen & Terry Hanley

(please email: e.steffen@uel.ac.uk or edith.m.steffen@gmail.com)

Edith Steffen