1,398 research outputs found

    Exploring the use of nature as an adjunct to psychological interventions for depression in young populations

    Get PDF
    Depression in adolescence is a global priority and it is critical to identify effective and accessible interventions. This systematic review aimed to synthesise experimental research on nature-based interventions (NBIs), to determine effects on depressive symptoms in young people. The secondary research question sought to understand characteristics of effective NBIs. A comprehensive systematic search was conducted across major and grey literature databases and papers were screened according to specified criteria. Participants’ ages were required to be between 10 and 24 years and studies needed to use an experimental design, including a control group. Experimental conditions were defined by psychotherapeutic interventions with nature exposure and outcomes measured either clinical symptomatology or subjective states of depression. Ten papers were identified, quality assessed and summarised in a narrative synthesis. Thirteen significant effects were reported in nine studies, highlighting the potential for NBIs as effective interventions for depressive symptoms in young people. However, due to methodological biases, such as lack of randomisation or control over group differences and frequent use of passive control groups, there remains considerable uncertainty over the effectiveness of NBIs. Characteristics of effective NBIs are tentatively discussed, however, further work is needed to clarify which aspects specifically contribute to the beneficial effects observed. Future research should seek to address the limitations of small samples, selection biases and test NBIs against more comparable and evidence-based interventions. It is hoped future studies will consider the inclusion of clinical populations, to explore the utility of NBIs as a treatment option for adolescent depression

    An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination

    Get PDF
    This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with one’s freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with one’s thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies. The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity

    Wearable gaming technology: A study on the relationships between wearable features and gameful experiences

    Get PDF
    With the parallel advancement and evolution of psycho-physiological sensors, haptics, and overall wearable computing, wearable devices have become a mainstay in everyday life. While gaming is one of the most intuitively appealing areas for using wearable devices, most gaming concepts relying on wearable devices have had only moderate success. Therefore, further knowledge is needed by game developers for innovating new gaming concepts, by wearable designers to innovate new affordances for gaming in wearables, and by gamers for seeing the possibilities of what wearables can bring to gaming. To address this research problem, we combined vignette and survey studies (N = 289) to investigate which features of wearables (integrability, wearability, modularity, sociability, programmability, bio-adaptability, audiovisuality, and embodied modality) would lead to gameful experiences. Overall, the results indicate that integrability to games, wearability, modularity, and sociability were dimensions of wearables which were most strongly connected with the expectation of a heightened game experience. The findings of the study contribute to the current understanding on the experiential value of gaming wearables, as well as providing practical guidance for gaming wearables designers and marketers.Peer reviewe

    An embodied approach to informational interventions: using conceptual metaphors to promote sustainable healthy diets

    Get PDF
    Poor diet quality and environmental degradation are two major challenges of our times. Unhealthy and unsustainable dietary practices, such as the overconsumption of meat and consumer food waste behaviour, contribute greatly to both issues. Across seventeen online and field experiments, in two different cultures (US and China), this thesis investigates if the embodied cognition approach, and more specifically, research on conceptual metaphors, can be used to develop interventions to promote sustainable healthy diets. Interventions relying on conceptual metaphors have been shown to stimulate attitudinal and behavioural changes in other fields (e.g., marketing and political communications), but are rarely adopted to encourage sustainable healthy diets. To fill in this gap in the literature, I conducted five sets of experimental studies examining the effects of different metaphors on specific sustainable healthy dietary practices, each of which forms an independent empirical paper (Chapters 2-6 of the thesis). After introducing the current perspectives on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors in the context of this research (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 looks into the conceptual metaphor “Healthy is Up”, demonstrating that US people implicitly associate healthiness with verticality, and offering recommendations for healthy eating guidelines. Chapter 3 extends this research to Chinese samples and partially replicates the results. Chapter 4 shows that the anthropomorphic metaphor “Animals are Friends” discourages meat consumption by inducing anticipatory guilt among US omnivores, whereas Chapter 5 reveals that Chinese omnivores are more responsive to another anthropomorphic metaphor, namely, “Animals are Family”. Bringing lab insights 6 to the real world, Chapter 6 demonstrates with a longitudinal field experiment that anthropomorphic metaphors together with environmental feedback result in a higher reduction in food waste as compared to other feedback interventions. The strengths, limitations and implications of those empirical papers are discussed in the conclusive part of the thesis

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

    Get PDF
    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Is there a Relationship between Parents' Screen Usage and Young Children’s Development?

    Get PDF
    There has been growing concern over the links between children's screen time use and cognitive development (Halton, 2020). However, researchers have generally overlooked the possible impact of parental screen time, which might decrease the opportunities of learning and social interactions for young children. To address this gap, we investigated the relationship between parental screen use and toddlers’ development. However, the start of this thesis coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and a few experimental tasks had to be adapted online. Thus, this thesis examined first whether online paradigms can provide valid data (word recognition, word learning and language assessment). Second, the main objective was to explore the relationship between parental screen use and young children’s language skills, and to revisit the link between parental screen time and children’s empathy. Findings from Chapter 2 provide support for the reliability of online testing with children. These experiments point to promising avenues of investigation in early language studies, and to possibilities for reaching out to families around the world. Findings from Chapter 3 revealed no impact of parental phone text on children’s learning in a lab situation. However, they suggest that parental responses to technoference and attitudes towards smartphones may moderate the relationship between parental screen use and children’s development. When examining effects in real life, a first exploratory study indicated an effect of parental screen time (in real life) on children’s language vocabulary when assessed via a parental questionnaire, at least for children aged 16 months and above. A second study was conducted with more objective measures of screen time and children’s vocabulary knowledge, and no association was found between parental screen time and children’s language when assessed via a standardised face-to-face language test. Findings from Chapter 4 showed a negative association between children’s alone screen time and their cognitive empathy abilities. However, parental screen time was not related to children’s cognitive empathy. The experiments and studies reported in this thesis fail to reveal a robust association between parental screen time and early language, at least in the population that we have studied here. Importantly, the findings suggest how parental screen use may be a moderator in children’s development and not a causal factor. They demonstrate the need to investigate more precisely why and how parents use electronic devices such as mobile phones during interactions with their children, might directly influence early language and emotional development

    Study of stress detection and proposal of stress-related features using commercial-off-the-shelf wrist wearables

    Get PDF
    This paper discusses the possibility of detecting personal stress making use of popular wearable devices available in the market. Different instruments found in the literature to measure stress-related features are reviewed, distinguishing between subjective tests and mechanisms supported by the analysis of physiological signals from clinical devices. Taking them as a reference, a solution to estimate stress based on the use of commercial-off-the-shelf wrist wearables and machine learning techniques is described. A mobile app was developed to induce stress in a uniform and systematic way. The app implements well-known stress inducers, such as the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test, the Stroop Color-Word Interference Test, and a hyperventilation activity. Wearables are used to collect physiological data used to train classifiers that provide estimations on personal stress levels. The solution has been validated in an experiment involving 19 subjects, offering an average accuracy and F-measures close to 0.99 in an individual model and an accuracy and F-measure close to 0.85 in a global 2-level classifier model. Stress can be a worrying problem in different scenarios, such as in educational settings. Thus, the last part of the paper describes the proposal of a set of stress related indicators aimed to support the management of stress over time in such settings.Agencia Estatal de InvestigaciĂłn | Ref. TIN2016-80515-RUniversidade de Vig

    UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023

    Get PDF
    The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

    Differences in well-being:the biological and environmental causes, related phenotypes, and real-time assessment

    Get PDF
    Well-being is a complex, and multifaceted construct that includes feeling good and functioning well. There is a growing global recognition of well-being as an important research topic and public policy goal. Well-being is related to less behavioral and emotional problems, and is associated with many positive aspects of daily life, including longevity, higher educational achievement, happier marriage, and more productivity at work. People differ in their levels of well-being, i.e., some people are in general happier or more satisfied with their lives than others. These individual differences in well-being can arise from many different factors, including biological (genetic) influences and environmental influences. To enhance the development of future mental health prevention and intervention strategies to increase well-being, more knowledge about these determinants and factors underlying well-being is needed. In this dissertation, I aimed to increase the understanding of the etiology in a series of studies using different methods, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, twin designs, and molecular genetic designs. In part I, we brought together all published studies on the neural and physiological factors underlying well-being. This overview allowed us to critically investigate the claims made about the biology involved in well-being. The number of studies on the neural and physiological factors underlying well-being is increasing and the results point towards potential correlates of well-being. However, samples are often still small, and studies focus mostly on a single biomarker. Therefore, more well-powered, data-driven, and integrative studies across biological categories are needed to better understand the neural and physiological pathways that play a role in well-being. In part II, we investigated the overlap between well-being and a range of other phenotypes to learn more about the etiology of well-being. We report a large overlap with phenotypes including optimism, resilience, and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, when removing the genetic overlap between well-being and depressive symptoms, we showed that well-being has unique genetic associations with a range of phenotypes, independently from depressive symptoms. These results can be helpful in designing more effective interventions to increase well-being, taking into account the overlap and possible causality with other phenotypes. In part III, we used the extreme environmental change during the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate individual differences in the effects of such environmental changes on well-being. On average, we found a negative effect of the pandemic on different aspects of well-being, especially further into the pandemic. Whereas most previous studies only looked at this average negative effect of the pandemic on well-being, we focused on the individual differences as well. We reported large individual differences in the effects of the pandemic on well-being in both chapters. This indicates that one-size-fits-all preventions or interventions to maintain or increase well-being during the pandemic or lockdowns will not be successful for the whole population. Further research is needed for the identification of protective factors and resilience mechanisms to prevent further inequality during extreme environmental situations. In part IV, we looked at the real-time assessment of well-being, investigating the feasibility and results of previous studies. The real-time assessment of well-being, related variables, and the environment can lead to new insights about well-being, i.e., results that we cannot capture with traditional survey research. The real-time assessment of well-being is therefore a promising area for future research to unravel the dynamic nature of well-being fluctuations and the interaction with the environment in daily life. Integrating all results in this dissertation confirmed that well-being is a complex human trait that is influenced by many interrelated and interacting factors. Future directions to understand individual differences in well-being will be a data-driven approach to investigate the complex interplay of neural, physiological, genetic, and environmental factors in well-being
    • 

    corecore