Bridging Neuroscience Techniques and Community Psychology

Author: Cailee Nelson, Ph.D. ​​

This week in the B-RAD lab’s inclusion in neuroscience discussion, we considered how to bridge neuroscience techniques with core principles from community psychology. Community psychology is a relatively new field that emphasizes examining psychological topics in a context that is outside of the individual. For example, community psychologists might ask: “How do the systems a person exists in influence their psyche and overall well-being?”.  
To aid in our discussion, we used this website to better understand the 10 core principles emphasized in community psychology. While several principles stood out to us, we spent a lot of time discussing the core principle of interdisciplinary collaboration. This principle emphasizes involving many different members of the community in research practices. While the lab agreed that it seems like common sense to implement this type of practice, we realized this does not always happen. It was pointed out that researchers should not be “parasites”—only taking information without giving anything back to the community. To understand how we can better do this as neuroscientists, the lab discussed ways to get the community involved in our research (e.g., community outreach events, presenting our findings to the community frequently), appropriately crediting our research participants, and creating teams to help translate and enact change in the community.  
Finally, the lab addressed why communities may not always trust researchers by discussing well-known, unethical experiments (e.g., the Tuskegee experiment) that had long-lasting, detrimental effects on the communities that were involved. We established that it is the researcher’s duty to build trust by showing up for the community in different ways and to not take advantage of any trust that already exists. As the B-RAD Lab often recruits children to participate in our research, we considered ways we could do this for our participants’ communities and decided that attending different school events like football games, school plays, or band performances might help.  
Overall, it is clear that researchers interested in understanding human cognition and behavior must consider not only the individual participants but also the different communities they exist in when designing, implementing, and disseminating our research.