This commentary recognizes the theoretical, empirical, and clinical contributions of metacognitive interpersonal therapy (MIT) as delineated by Dimaggio and Pasarella. Furthermore, it explores remaining challenges considering current developments in basic psychology, psychopathology, mental health care, and emerging cultural trends. In particular, four areas for further development are discussed: the explicit integration of broader conceptualizations of cognition (i.e., 4E cognition and predicting processing), greater attention to the social and cultural determinants of mental health and social justice, the implications of precision mental health care and artificial intelligence for treatment personalization, and the need for further research on stratification, process-outcome associations, cost-effectiveness and implementation. Addressing these challenges may contribute to consolidating MIT and strengthening its position within the evolving landscape of contemporary psychotherapies.

In this paper, we consider how methods not only guide how research should be conducted, but also act as a vehicle that advances sets of values within a field. To provide context, we review the historical forces that led an early psychology to privilege post-positivist experimental methods, resulting in a narrowing of acceptable subjects and research tools for inquiry. Psychology then shifted toward a resurgence of qualitative methods that were rooted in human science traditions and centered meaning, context, and lived experience. Because the field of psychology is often defined by its methods, the rise of constructivist qualitative traditions has fostered major shifts in the field, challenging prior perspectives and broadening the questions that were studied. In the form of methods, constructivist practices have been institutionalized, so it has become routine that qualitative researchers engage in epistemological reflection, researcher reflexivity, and critical and contextualized meaning-making. Looking toward the future, two trends within qualitative methods can further promote constructivist ideas within psychological science: (1) the methodization of the feminist concept of epistemic privilege; and (2) greater recognition of embodied, empathic forms of knowing, including felt sense. Together, these developments suggest that as qualitative methods evolve, they will continue to redefine how psychologists study experience, leading the discipline toward an increasingly constructivist science.

Existing in the margins means inhabiting contradiction and complexity. What does it mean to be a researcher who belongs neither to the struggles of one’s ancestors nor to the dominant frameworks of academia? As a brown scholar, I navigate binaries, Black and White, colonizer and colonized, that obscure the layered realities of my identity. This liminal position places me at the collision of the politics of identity and the identity of politics. My research interrogates the Eurocentric roots of academia and belonging while also reflecting my own positionality. I approach vulnerability as both a methodological stance and an existential state. Within constructivist psychology, I draw on autoethnography and Dialogical Self Theory (DST) to reflect on how I am simultaneously shaping and shaped by the research process. What happens when the very tools of analysis emerge from epistemologies that have long rendered people like me invisible? Through storytelling and critical analysis, I show how identity and knowledge are co-constructed and disrupt boundaries that exclude perspectives like mine. Vulnerability is not weakness but possibility, expanding what constructivist psychology can be. My work is an act of survival and transformation, insisting on new ways of imagining knowledge, identity, and belonging.

This paper explores three socially oriented approaches to mental health recovery: Open Dialogue (OD), Recovery Capital (RC), and the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). Each approach challenges individualistic and medicalized models by emphasizing social, relational, and material contexts. We argue that these approaches, while distinct, can complement each other in practice. PTMF provides a socio-material understanding of distress as a response to power and threat, RC identifies resources necessary for sustainable recovery, and OD offers a dialogical practice that mobilizes these resources together with the person’s social network. By initiating a “trialogue” between these approaches, we propose a processual model: understanding origins (PTMF), identifying resources (RC), and enacting change through dialogue (OD). We conclude by suggesting directions for integrating these approaches into mental health services and call for further research on their combined potential to foster socially just and contextually grounded practices.

This article explores the epistemological and ethical implications of researcher implication in the field of cultural psychology, particularly from the perspective of Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism (SCC). Grounded in a series of retrospective notes written by one of the authors, a Latin American psychotherapist and immigrant working with other Latin American migrants in Brazil, the article articulates a reflective methodological approach that situates the researcher as both subject and object of psychological inquiry. Rather than presenting empirical findings, we engage in a dialogical reflection grounded in key theoretical frameworks: SCC, Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and exotopy, William James’s notion of retrospection, and the Dialogical Self Theory. Through the narrative analysis of three selected clinical scenes, we examine how disquieting experiences interrupt the symbolic continuity of the self, prompting ethical and epistemological transformations. These scenes are approached as dialogical chronotopes, symbolic condensations of time, space, and affect through which the self becomes porous to otherness. We propose that this retrospective, embodied writing practice functions as a form of critical autoethnography and enables new configurations of knowledge production in psychology, rooted in symbolic hospitality, ethical vulnerability, and narrative dissonance.

This study explored how Sexual Minority students at a conservative religious university interpret and navigate conflict between sexual and religious identities. A constructivist-interpretivist epistemology guided the use of Consensual Qualitative Research, with 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews analyzed through iterative team coding. Analysis generated three domains: (1) Identity Conflict: Disrupted Meaning, (2) Limits on Narrative Flexibility, and (3) Reconciliation: Rebuilding Coherence. Participants linked ruptures in narrative coherence to institutional doctrine, cultural norms, and moments of interpretive collapse. Most participants endorsed some level of suicidality when identity tensions exceeded the interpretive capacity of available narratives. Constraints on narrative integration included institutional enforcement (at the church and university level), relational pressures, and limited access to affirming resources. Strategies for rebuilding coherence varied, but included individual reinterpretation of spiritual beliefs (with less emphasis on religiosity for most participants), supportive relational dialogue, and increased tolerance for ambiguity. Participants described reconciliation not as the elimination of tension but as increased narrative viability across domains of belief, identity, and belonging. Findings advance constructivist theory by documenting how identity is actively reauthored in contexts where narrative flexibility and meaning-making are institutionally constrained.

Despite decades of reform, science education continues to fall short of its aim to cultivate scientifically literate individuals capable of evidence-informed decision-making. However, dominant models of scientific literacy often understate the role of identity—particularly how learners navigate epistemic and affective tensions when making decisions. Drawing on classical identity traditions in developmental and social-cognitive psychology, Dialogical Self Theory (DST), and the Conceptual Profile Model (CPM), I propose the Science Identity as a Pathway to Literacy (SIPL) framework, which positions identity development as central to achieving scientific literacy. SIPL highlights two core developmental processes: (1) developing awareness of the dialogical self and (2) building the capacity to adopt meta-positions. Together these processes help learners coordinate conflicting I-positions and conceptual profiles when engaging with science and in decision-making more broadly. By reconceptualizing literacy as an emergent dialogical competence rather than the mere accumulation of knowledge and practices, SIPL foregrounds internal negotiation, conceptual flexibility, and epistemic agency as essential outcomes of science education. This framing aligns with emerging policy perspectives, including the draft PISA 2025 Science Framework, which recognizes science identity as an important dimension of scientific literacy.

I comment on Ken Gergen and Sheila McNamee’s article: Social Construction: Legacy and Challenges for the twenty first Century, by focusing on two recurring critiques of their social constructionist writings: concerns about relativism and omitted mention of an agentive self.

The present research examines the potential protective role of meaning in life in mitigating the emotional effects associated with an invalidating family environment in a Spanish-speaking university population. A quantitative, cross-sectional, and retrospective study was conducted using an online survey divided into sociodemographic and clinical data, as well as adaptations to the Spanish versions of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, the Brief Symptom Inventory, and the Invalidating Childhood Environments Scale. The sample consisted of 402 participants. Their ages ranged between 22 and 66 years old, and all of them were Spanish-speakers, mainly from Europe, North America, and Latin America. Moreover, 8.70% (n = 31) reported having been diagnosed with a mental health disorder during childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood. Results showed that Meaning in life moderates the relationship between an invalidating paternal environment and overall psychopathology. Meaning in life may act as a protective factor that mediates between individuals’ psychological well-being and their mental health status and mitigates the negative emotional effects stemming from an invalidating family environment.

Dialogical Self Theory (DST) is an emergent field in psychology with significant applications in constructivist psychology. In this article, the main achievements and limitations of DST-inspired research are summarized. Achievements refer to the breadth and depth of the Theory’s applications in a diversity of fields: cultural, constructivist, educational, organizational psychology, and clinical psychology & psychotherapy. Special emphasis is given to new DST-related research methods. Two main limitations of DST research are discussed: the significance of external I-positions as others-in-the-self and the embodied nature of the dialogical self. Finally, some promising future perspectives are outlined: the concepts of “position uncertainty,” as characterizing the position repertoire as a whole, “we-positions” as referring to collective voices in the self as a society of mind, and the significance of the “democratic organization of the self” in contemporary society.