A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Translation – Ideas for Fostering and Disseminating (Clinical) Translational Psychology

Abstract: Although evidence-based psychological treatments have received wide recognition as established interventions for numerous conditions, challenges concerning their availability, efficacy, and dissemination remain. During the last decades, numerous fields in medicine have improved their treatments by adopting a translational perspective that integrates research from different basic and applied fields. Systematic meta-research does, however, show that only a minority of evidence-based treatments in clinical psychology are grounded in (or derived from) basic psychological research. To facilitate communication between clinical scientists and other psychologists, researchers from the University of Marburg conducted semi-structured interviews with spokespersons of different subfields of the German Psychological Society. From these interviews, recommendations, and ideas for improving translational psychology were collected. This integrative article is the result of an iterative consensus-building process with the interviewed experts. It summarizes insights and derives useful guidance for novel translational research projects. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of translational psychology and provide explicit instruction on how to transfer basic psychological research into applied research and vice versa. We provide recommendations regarding the incorporation of translational psychology into higher education curricula. Additionally, we explore ways to enhance scientific integrity and keep pace with rapid digital transformation in our field. Finally, we present a concise overview of science dissemination and explore how translational psychology contributes to the resolution of pressing (societal) issues.