Recognizing Exceptional Contributions to Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy
Joe Miles, Ph.D.
One of the duties of President-Elect is to chair the Awards Committee. In this role, I get the chance to review nominations of folks doing outstanding work in group psychology and group psychotherapy, and to honor these people at the APA Convention. For those who were not able to attend the Convention in Seattle this past August, I wanted to take the opportunity here to recognize our award winners.
This year, we were able to award four students with Student Travel Awards: Dongjun Shin, Hannah Shinew, Taro Skikawa, and Yihen Zhou. In addition, we were able to award six Student Poster Awards in two categories: a general category and diversity and social justice. In the general category, the third-place award went to Hyun Ji Yi (co-authors: Kun Wang, Megan Prass, Jahnavi Pandya, Jiyoung Shin, and Martin Kivlighan) for their poster entitled: Exploring the Process of Fostering Group Relationships in Virtual Group Therapy from the Perspective of Group Facilitators. The second-place award went to Lingguo Meng (co-authors: Tianxin Wang, and Martin Kivlighan III) for their poster entitled: Generalizability of the Therapeutic Factor Inventory-8 Comparing Clinical and Non-Clinical Sample. And finally, the first-place poster went to Kun Wang (co-authors: Lisa Brownstone, Jade Cool, and Martin Kivlighan) for their poster entitled: Examining Within- and Between-Member Cohesion and Working Alliance Effects on Group Member’s Motivation: An Actor-Partner Interdependence Model.
In the diversity and social justice category, the third-place award went to Isabella Panagos (co-author: Robinder P. Bedi) for their poster entitled: Stability and Valence in Group Psychotherapy: A Replication and Extension. The second-place award went to Gabriela Munoz De Zubiria (co-authors: Natalia Vallejo Ulloa, and Eric C. Chen, PhD) for their poster entitled: Insights from a School-Based Group Counseling Initiative for Newly Arrived Latinx Middle Schoolers. And the first-place award went to Hannah Brody (co-author: Yaakov Green) entitled: The Use of Community-based Group Processing Interventions in Response to Collective Grief and Trauma. Congratulations to each of these poster award winners!
The Division also gives two awards to recognize outstanding contributions to diversity and social justice in group work—one to a student and one to a professional. The 2024 Student Award for Outstanding Contribution to Diversity in Group Psychology or Group Psychotherapy went to Gabriel L. Medianero Araúz. As Vice President of the Psychology Student Association of the Universidad de Panamá, Gabriel has led advocacy efforts related to legislation posing threats to psychologists. He also served as the Panamanian Representative and External Vice President of the Global Student Psychology Committee, and helped organize the first Global Student Psychology Convention. He was Regional Coordinator for Latin America of the Society for Community Research and Action, advocating for the inclusion of Spanish language correspondences and academic events, which increased participation from individuals in Latin America. Additionally, he organized the first webinar series on “Community Psychology in Latin America” aiming to highlight community psychologists’ scientific and academic work in the region. Finally, he has also been an international member of the Division 49 institute and is committed to furthering his education and training in group psychotherapy and getting certified as a group psychotherapist. Congratulations, Gabriel!
The Award for Outstanding Professional Contribution to Diversity in Group Psychology or Group Psychotherapy went to Brian Keum. Brian’s recent work has examined social justice norms in the training program individually and at the group level using cutting-edge Group-Actor Partner Interdependence Model, and the Polynomial Regression and Response Surface Analysis. His work has shown the importance of collective norms around social justice at a program level in relation to students’ engagement in advocacy behaviors and is sure to have useful implications for education and training. Congratulations, Brian!
Nathaniel Wade was the winner of the 2024 Excellence in Teaching of Group Dynamics Award. In 2005, Dr. Wade developed a training clinic focused on group psychotherapy in the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University, which grew into Network Community Counseling Services. This clinic provides high-quality, low-cost clinical services while offering state-of-the-art group psychotherapy training. Dr. Wade is the director and supervisor of the clinic, and leads a practicum in group therapy, with supervision in a group format to reinforce the training in group dynamics. Students report feeling “lucky” to have this training experience, and most of the students at Network accrue hundreds of direct group therapy practice and supervision hours. In addition to the services offered and the training provided, he has archived over 2000 hours of group therapy recordings to contribute to group process and outcome research. His nominators said things like: “Without question, the most formative aspect of my training experience with Dr. Wade was my time as a trainee within Network Community Counseling Services,” “Nathaniel is a skilled researcher, mentor, and educator who offers creative, exceptional doctoral training that has had a lasting impact on me and many others. I am forever grateful for all I have learned from him,” and “I am a better clinician because of him.” Congratulations to Dr. Wade!
This year, the Division also gave a Special Award to recognize “Psychologists during the War,” a group of Ukrainian psychologists working with the Division of “Psychoanalytic Psychology and Psychotherapy” of the National Psychological Association of Ukraine who have been providing services to address the human suffering, fear, and trauma brought on by the Russian invasion. According to their nominator, Dr. Oksana Yakushko, professor at George Washington University, these “psychoanalytic clinicians, have engaged in numerous group processes of supervision, support, and crisis care, [joined] together with other psychotherapists, social workers, physical therapists and doctors to initiate what they called (translated to English) the “Psychologists during the War Project” in response to this extreme reality of suffering. In August 2022, groups of them began to visit in [the] de-occupied territories, setting up spaces in the centers (squares, libraries, hospitals, movie theaters) of little or big towns, with an offer to provide individuals with someone to talk to or consult about their mental or physical needs. Their initial projects were sponsored by USAID and UK funding. They called their groups of clinicians “mobile brigades,” and deployed them to any town they could, considering resources they had. While at first, they envisioned that [a] small number of individuals would come to seek private conversations with available clinicians, what they found were great numbers of people who were especially interested in group formats of care. Thus, the Project shifted primarily to group work, starting to offer therapeutic groups opportunities as these communities reeled from atrocities.
“In addition to pragmatics of offering care to so many people who came out in hundreds to talk to someone, they found that offering space for groups served another vitally important purpose in addition to psychosocial processing and psychosocial educational support. Trauma, survivor guilt, extreme social dislocation and distrust in other human beings, psychosomatic concerns, and challenges with managing extreme emotional states were among key documented focus areas of these groups. [As one of the project founders, Dr. Dorozhkin) observed: “You just could approach to any person on the street and ask: “Were you here during the occupation?”, and this random passerby stopped and could tell the most intimate moments of his life for an hour: cry, share memories of his neighbors, some of whom were killed by the Russian invaders, some – were tortured to death, and some went abroad in search of asylum. It seemed that either those people had impaired function of emotional containment, or the victims had that hard-psychological trauma and were overwhelmed with feelings to the extent where any question provokes the need to release an excessive amount of emotion.”
Dr. Yakushko noted that “one of the most important contributions of group format of these psychologists’ intervention as their recognition of the absolute necessity to work on issues of social trust in these communities.” She also praised the Project’s efforts in establishing “psychosocial and psychoeducational groups for numerous volunteers.” The Project’s use of group work to address human suffering and trauma in a time of extreme need is inspiring and I am so happy that we have the opportunity as a Division to recognize this extraordinary group of psychologists.
We were honored to have Dr. Valeriia Palii, President of the National Psychological Association of Ukraine, who works with these psychologists, at the Convention to accept this award!
Finally, the Division honored Paul Hewitt with the Arthur Teicher Group Psychologist of the Year Award. In the words of his nominator, “This is an important honor, and Dr. Hewitt has earned it through his years of commitment to group theory, research and practice. Given the many important contributions he has made to understanding group therapy process and outcome, I cannot imagine a more deserving person for this award. Dr. Hewitt has engaged in lifelong scholarship with other leaders in the field of group work.”
Dr. Hewitt is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and in The Psychotherapy Program, Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Bergamo, Italy as well as a Registered Clinical Psychologist in British Columbia. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Section on Clinical Psychology of CPA and winner of the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science.
Dr. Hewitt is recognized for his contributions to the theory and research on the role of perfectionism as a clinical core vulnerability factor in psychopathology, physical health, relationship, and achievement problems. He has published well over 300 research papers, books, and chapters. He has published extensively on the assessment and treatment of perfectionism, developed a group and individual psychotherapeutic treatment of perfectionism, known as Dynamic-Relational Therapy for perfectionism, ( DRT-P) and a model of how perfectionism in patients and in therapists can influence treatment outcome.
He has published extensively, including numerous papers evaluating group treatment process and outcomes and a recent, large randomized controlled trial of Group DRT-P with two publications illustrating the efficacy of DRT-P in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy Research. Two of his books, Perfectionism: A relational approach to conceptualization, assessment, and treatment and Group psychodynamic interpersonal psychotherapy outline the conceptualization of group psychotherapy for various issues and includes detailed information on DRT-P.
Dr. Hewitt is not only a scholar and researcher, but he is also a strong clinician. His DRT-P model of group work is illustrated in three invited video demonstrations by the American Psychological Association. We have invited Dr. Hewitt to speak more formally about his work at the Convention next year. Congratulations to Dr. Hewitt!
I want to thank Drs. Cheri Marmarosh and Martyn Whittingham for serving on the Award Committee and all who submitted nominations. Nominations for the 2025 awards are due June 1, 2025. Information about each of these awards can be found here: https://www.apadivisions.org/division-49/awards. Please consider nominating someone (or yourself)!
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