Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research: Joseph Patrick Gone

The Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research is given to a psychologist whose research has led to important discoveries or developments in the field of applied psychology. The 2021 recipient is Joseph P. Gone, for "extraordinary contributions to the application of psychological knowledge for American Indian peoples. A central problem defining his scholarship is the (post)colonial predicament of psychological services in 'Indian Country.' On one hand, enduring mental health disparities underscore the need for more and better mental health services. On the other, conventional psychosocial approaches to professional treatment depend on concepts, categories, principles, and practices routinely identified by community authorities and formal research as culturally foreign and experientially irrelevant for many American Indians. In response, Gone has elaborated promising new approaches to making mental health services more accessible, culturally appropriate, and demonstrably effective for alleviating debilitating distress among American Indians through three lines of research. He has documented how Indigenous peoples locally construe various facets of mind, self, identity, emotion, social relations, communication, wellness, dysfunction, and healing (i.e., ethnopsychological investigations). He has demonstrated ways in which these local construals converge with and diverge from standard approaches in professional mental health practice (i.e., assessments of cultural commensurability). And he has formulated ways that applied psychologists can use these understandings to partner with Indigenous communities to implement and evaluate alternative interventions that remain culturally consonant and robustly therapeutic (i.e., therapeutic innovations)." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).