Editorial: When more science is not enough – rethinking the ‘translational dividend’ of clinical psychological science

Abstract

To broaden and diversify the perspectives and experiences informing the editorial work for this journal, 27 affiliate editors have joined the ranks of the editorial board since 2023. They each work together with one of the 20 joint editors. As an early‐career scientist practitioner who sees both papers as well as patients (Dagan) and a late‐career scientist seeing papers only (Schuengel), we have worked together in handling submissions within the broad domain of clinically relevant research on young people and their families. Our editorial dialogue picks up on an earlier editorial, raising the issue of limited ‘translational dividend’ of our science. We identify structural and practical barriers that stand in the way of scientific knowledge transitioning into practice, and we conclude by considering how the subject matters in our field require intellectual humility in our research and editorial decision‐making with respect to contrast with actual practice.

The aim of this journal is to publish the highest quality clinically relevant research in psychology, psychiatry and related disciplines. There happen to be quite a few authors who want to contribute towards this goal. In 2025, about 1,400 submissions reached our office, of which only 11.5% could be accepted for publication. The outgoing editor‐in‐chief Edmund Sonuga‐Barke had the early vision to create a broad editorial board to give all this work the careful attention that it deserves, with now 20 editors with their own unique specialistic area and expertise. As even this broad bench struggled to handle increasing output from our evolving, global field, JCPP started in 2023 to recruit affiliate editors, representing a younger and more diverse generation of scholars. They work in pairs with each of the joint editors to broaden and diversify the perspectives and experiences that feed into the pursuit of the journal's mission. Until now, 27 affiliate editors have been part of this program.

We, Schuengel and Dagan, have been collaborating in research for some years, sharing theoretical and methodological perspectives from our work on attachment theory and meta‐analysis. However, we differ not only in our career stage (late vs. early) but also in the experiences that shape our outlook on the research in our field. Dagan sees patients in his psychotherapy practice and papers in his teaching and research at the university. Schuengel sees only papers. These differences manifest in how we evaluate submissions to the journal, as well as the meaning of findings for practice. It therefore prompted a dialogue on the question what makes scientifically rigorous research genuinely useful to practitioners and meaningful to young people and families.

Reframing that question, Sonuga‐Barke (2026) in his editorial for the January issue of this journal highlighted in the context of neurodevelopmental conditions the tension between the increasingly rigorous epidemiological and intervention studies and their modest impact on practice at scale. While understanding of mental health has made significant progress, the ‘translational dividend … has generally been disappointing’ (p. 1). From a science perspective, resolution of this tension has been pursued through increasing the rigour of the research, which is underlined by the 11 empirical research papers published in this issue being based on no less than 506,982 young participants. Large samples can increase statistical precision and detection of exceedingly subtle and rare effects. However, ‘big data’ and statistical power do not, on their own, ensure that findings will be useful to mental health professionals in everyday practice (Sonuga‐Barke, 2023).

This problem is not new. It was first documented and formalised in the Boulder Conference in 1949 (Raimy, 1950) in the United States, giving rise to the longstanding attempt to bridge the divide between scientific knowledge and clinical practice via what is often referred to as the scientist–practitioner model. The model's idea is compelling: clinical psychologists should develop expertise in both  scientific research and in clinical practice, which will then allow for a better integration of the two. However, the scientist–practitioner model has not fully achieved its integrative premise (Gee et al., 2022). This is demonstrated, for example, by the low rate at which practice is conducted according to carefully synthesized and weighed evidence in guidelines for practice (e.g. Similä et al., 2026; Westerlund, Ivarsson, & Richter‐Sundberg, 2021).

The gap between science and practice concerns not only the movement of knowledge from one domain to another, but also the limits of what scientific methods can capture and its usability under current conditions.

We may therefore ask: What continues to limit the ‘translational dividend’ of clinical psychological science? A limited ‘translation dividend’ may perhaps be ascribed not only to scientific knowledge failing to travel intact to clinical practice, but also to the fact that scientific knowledge incompletely captures the processes and outcomes that matter in clinical practice. In this respect, two related problems warrant consideration.

First, whereas science provides a powerful way of ‘knowing’, it is of course only one way of obtaining knowledge; there are other essential ways of knowing that are not as formalised, yet they are integral in mental health practice. Love, hate and despair are just some of the experiences that young clients seek help with. To what degree can scientists be confident that their questionnaires, interviews and even behavioural observations can ever cover the complexity of these human phenomena to guide clinical practice? Reflective clinicians will be the first to admit that good interventions often entail tacit knowledge, habits shaped by training and experience and beliefs about human nature, relationships and what constitutes change. A barrier of science‐to‐practice translation may thus not be about how empirical findings become more precise, more statistically powerful, or even how well they are communicated to practicians. Rather, the barrier is epistemological: what can be assessed scientifically to begin with is already limited in its power to capture what the targets of clinical interventions‐ youth and families‐ are dealing with.

Second, what qualifies as good intervention research does not always fully match what clinicians and patients experience as successful therapeutic intervention in practice. By and large, intervention science tends to evaluate outcomes at the (average) group level and aims to reduce psychopathological symptoms, change diagnostic status, or improve overall functioning in different domains of life. These are, by all means, important outcomes to assess. But the young patients and families seeking therapy are sensitive to whether their account of what brought them to therapy and their suffering is accurately acknowledged and whether they feel seen and cared for rather than simply ‘treated’. This is merely a truism for those who work with clients across the lifespan and psychotherapy research has identified relational factors that can function as proxies of such patient experiences (e.g., empathy and therapeutic alliance; Wampold, 2015) even though testing their causal role remains daunting. Interventions may thus be deemed ‘successful’ and worthwhile disseminating to the public without the people for whom these interventions are meant perceiving these as meaningful, appropriate, and responsive to their needs. In this respect, Sonuga‐Barke's ‘paradigm flipping’ (2026, p. 1) is important, whereby research becomes more meaningful and legitimate if it incorporates young clients and their families in the research process itself.

Beyond the inherent limits of psychological science to capture clinical phenomenon essential for patients' well‐being, movement of scientific knowledge from clinical science to practice is also capped by the conditions in which practice is conducted. An intervention protocol may demonstrate efficacy under controlled conditions while remaining difficult to integrate into the structure and demands of ordinary care. Synthesising and weighing evidence to produce guidelines for practitioners is certainly helpful but publishing such guidelines without considering implementation will fall short. Indeed, many recommended protocols carefully crafted and tested by clinical scientists are not well‐suited for their implementation (Takamatsu et al. 2026) and may require actions taken at organisational and funding levels.

The epistemological and pragmatic limits of clinical scientific knowledge may themselves lower practitioners' expectations that more and better science means better practice. Such an expectation regarding the low usability value of empirical findings, in turn, may drive practitioners' minimal engagement with the state‐of‐the‐art intervention research, further weakening the ‘translation dividend’.

Taken together, the limited ‘translational dividend’ cannot be understood solely as a problem of knowledge transfer from science to practice. In fact, ‘translation’ may be an incomplete metaphor. The gap between science and practice concerns not only the movement of knowledge from one domain to another, but also the limits of what scientific methods can capture and its usability under current conditions.

If we accept that there are barriers to knowledge transfer that have nothing to do with translation per‐se, then we ought to look beyond the emphasis on closing the science‐practice gap and call for intellectual humility about what clinical science can know, explain, and ultimately deliver to its potential beneficiaries. This does not mean, of course, that evidence of intervention effectiveness or clinical science in general should be downplayed or discarded altogether. When intervention research indicates improvement in outcomes, abductive reasoning permits the inference that its developers got something right—a framework of thinking about what works, perhaps—despite it being unclear what exactly such intervention got right. We thus may accept that practitioners may use scientific findings as reliable resources for clinical judgment rather than as instructions to be executed rigidly.

From an editorial perspective, intellectual humility entails encouraging authors to state explicitly what their findings can, and perhaps especially cannot establish. Editors can therefore ask whether (a) the constraints of the measures and outcomes used are acknowledged; (b) the questions and outcomes examined reflect experiences that matter to young people and their families beyond symptoms reduction; (c) findings observed at the group level are presented without assuming that they apply uniformly to individual patients; and (d) clinical implications are presented without implying that research can fully determine practice.

After all, the limited ‘translational dividend’ may not be a problem to overcome; rather, it may simply reflect the boundaries of clinical science.