1. Describe your field and the scope of your Fulbright project. How would you explain it to someone who is unfamiliar?
My field is counseling psychology. Counseling psychologists work with people who are experiencing problems-in-living by giving them new skills and perspectives. We also work with people to enhance their development and functioning.
My particular interest is understanding what makes group counseling interventions effective/ineffective and using this knowledge to improve group counseling practice. My Fulbright involves one trip to Taiwan and two trips to Italy. My Taiwanese colleague, Dr. Li-Fei Wng at National Taiwan Normal University, has developed a group counseling intervention focused on emotional cultivation. Emotional cultivation is a process of recognizing, appreciating and using one's emotions to drive context dependent functioning. Emotional cultivation contrasts with a western approach to emotional regulation, which involves controlling and suppressing inappropriate emotional expression.
During my Fulbright, I will work with Dr. Wang and her colleagues to further evaluate the emotional cultivation groups with a focus on understanding how group processes (e.g., group cohesion) and group composition effect member outcome. Working with my Italian colleague, Dr. Gianluca at the University of Palermo, we hope to initiate the emotional cultivation groups in Sicily because these groups may be a better fit for immigrants and refugees who are coming from non-Western cultures. In addition, we will continue our ongoing research on group counseling, focusing on validating a behavioral measure of effective group member functioning and examining the role of group leader modeling on effective group member functioning.
2. Who are the communities that will be impacted by your work?
The emotional cultivation groups that we run in Taiwan are focused on children and adolescents who are having difficulties in school settings because of emotional dysregulation. In Italy our counseling groups have focused on people with eating disorders and personal development groups for counselors in training.
3. How and why did you choose your partner institution?
Dr. Wang took a group counseling class from me when she was completing her Ph.D. in counseling psychology at the University of Missouri. When she returned to National Taiwan Normal University she invited me to do workshops on group counseling research for students at her university and for the Taiwan Counseling Association. Our research collaboration was an outgrowth of these workshops. I met Dr. Lo Coco at an international meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Because of our mutual interest in group counseling research we began our collaboration when I analyzed some data that he and colleagues collected. Later, I applied for and was awarded my first Fulbright (2015), which involved group counseling research at the University of Palermo. Our research collaboration has continued since the first Fulbright.
4. Why is international research important to you?
I and we in the US have a lot to learn from our colleagues in other western countries and other parts of the world. I have learned new ways of thinking about group counseling and different approaches to group counseling from working with my colleagues in Italy and Taiwan. These new learnings have enhanced both my research on groups and my practice of group counseling. I have a particular interest in the statistical modeling of group data, which presents a number of complexities and opportunities, and I am invested in teaching these modeling methods to other group counseling researchers. One of my goals in my international work is to introduce my international colleagues to the new statistical models and to help them improve their group counseling research.
5. Will your research collaboration continue past Fulbright?
Definitely, my research with my Italian colleagues began in 2012 and has resulted in 16 publications in peer-reviewed journals, with one just appearing this month. During my time in Italy for my Fulbright we will plan new data analyses for data we have already collected and plan new data collections. My colleagues in Taiwan have collected the world's largest and most in-depth group counseling data set. We have only begun to scratch the surface of this extensive data set. In addition, we plan to continue collecting data from our emotional cultivation groups for children and adolescents and to start a new project using emotional cultivation groups with teachers.
6. What was it like to join a new university community as an international Fulbright scholar?
Joining a new community was exciting and also daunting. The people I have met and am meeting are life-long friends and research collaborators. It has been eye opening to see how my colleagues operate in their university settings. I have learned new things about faculty roles and also gained a deeper appreciation for many of the affordances that UMD provides for faculty scholarship. The daunting aspect of working in both Italy and Taiwan is the language barrier. I speak neither Italian nor Mandarin so the burden of our communication falls on my colleagues. I often feel guilty that I have not been able to learn enough Italian or Mandarin to more evenly share the communication burden.
7. Share a memorable anecdote.
After a workshop I had given during my first trip to Taiwan, I went to dinner with several colleagues. We went to a restaurant that had live seafood in a large tank as you entered the restaurant. I was told to go to the tank and pick out dinner, so I went and picked out a lobster. When I returned to the table I learned that, as an honored guest, I was supposed to pick out dinner for all of the people at the table and not just dinner for me, so I had to return to the tank and greatly expand my selection. It can be hard picking out dinner for people you do not know well.
8. For other Terps that are interested in becoming Fulbright Scholars in the future, what perspective would you offer them?
After my first Fulbright, I served on the grant review panel for Fulbright applications for three years. This was a great experience for seeing the common features of successful applications. The most important factor was having an established collaboration and a strong letter of support from the prospective institution. As noted above, my collaboration with my Taiwanese colleagues came from the connection I made with Dr. Wang during her graduate education and my connection with Dr. Lo Coco came from both of us presenting at an international conference. Given these experiences, my advice is to nurture the international relationships you probably already have with former students and with people you have met in professional conferences. Reach out to them and establish joint research projects.