Developing a Citizen Social Science approach to understand urban stress and promote wellbeing in urban communities

This paper sets out the future potential and challenges for developing an interdisciplinary, mixed-method Citizen Social Science approach to researching urban emotions. It focuses on urban stress, which is increasingly noted as a global mental health challenge facing both urbanised and rapidly urbanising societies. The paper reviews the existing use of mobile psychophysiological or biosensing within urban environments—as means of ‘capturing’ the urban geographies of emotions. Methodological reflections are included on primary research using biosensing in a study of workplace and commuter stress for university employees in Birmingham (UK) and Salzburg (Austria) for illustrative purposes. In comparing perspectives on the conceptualisation and measurement of urban stress from psychology, neuroscience and urban planning, the difficulties of defining scientific constructs within Citizen Science are discussed to set out the groundwork for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. The novel methods, geo-located sensor technologies and data-driven approaches to researching urban stress now available to researchers pose a number of ethical, political and conceptual challenges around defining and measuring emotions, stress, human behaviour and urban space. They also raise issues of rigour, participation and social scientific interpretation. Introducing methods informed by more critical Citizen Social Science perspectives can temper overly individualised forms of data collection to establish more effective ways of addressing urban stress and promoting wellbeing in urban communities

Assessment of mental stress through the analysis of physiological signals acquired from wearable devices

Mental stress is a physiological state that directly correlates to the quality of life of individuals. Generally speaking, but especially true for disabled or elderly subjects, the assessment of such condition represents a very strong indicator correlated to the difficulties, and, in some case, to the frustration that derives from the execution of a task that results troublesome to be accomplished. This article describes a novel procedure for the assessment of the mental stress level through the use of low invasive wireless wearable devices. The information contained in electrocardiogram, respiratory signal, blood volume pulse, and electroencephalogram was extracted to set up an estimator for the cognitive workload level. A random forest classifier was implemented to assess the level of mental stress starting from a pool of 3481 features computed from the aforementioned physiological quantities. The proposed system was applied in a scenario in which two different mental states were elicited in the subject under investigation: first, a baseline resting condition was induced by the presentation of a relaxing video; then a stressful cognitive state was provoked by the administration of a mental arithmetic task. The random forest classifier shows an accuracy of 97.5% in discerning between these two mental states

Urbanicity is associated with behavioral and emotional problems in Dutch elementary school-aged children

Adults are 38% more likely to suffer from a psychiatric disorder when they live in an urban compared to a rural area. Urban upbringing may be particularly important. The aim of the present study was to examine whether urbanicity was independently associated with mental health in elementary school-aged children. Specifically, we investigated whether living in a more urban area was associated with exhibiting more behavioral and emotional problems, and whether this remained while controlling for other major risk factors for mental health problems in children. Data came from a Dutch general population study of children (n = 895). Information from four waves was used, in which children were aged approximately 8, 9, 11, and 12 years old. We used mixed effects models to assess the association between urbanicity and the outcomes of behavioral problems and emotional problems separately, while controlling for other major risk factors. The analyses showed that children who lived in more urban areas were significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral (p &lt; .001) and emotional (p &lt; .001) problems. This effect remained when controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, family socioeconomic status, parental symptoms of psychopathology, parenting stress, and parenting practices (behavioral: p = .02, emotional: p = .009). In line with research in adults, urbanicity seems to be independently associated with behavioral and emotional problems in children. A possible underlying mechanism is that the city is a stressful environment for children to grow up in, which contributes to an increased risk for mental health problems.Funding Agency:Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development 26200002 120620029</p