200234 SE Theory and Empirical Research (Mind and Brain) 2 (2024W)

Stress and resilience. Stress is an inevitable part of life. Some stressors are very personal (e.g. health problems) while others can be social (e.g. difficult colleagues) or environmental (e.g. street noise). Stressors can also be exogenous, i.e. external/outside of the person (e.g. noise), or endogenous, i.e. internal/within the person (e.g. fears and anxieties). How we cope with stress is strongly related to our mental health and well-being. Many psychological interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapies or Mindfulness Training try to support people cope with stressors they may face. The number of psychological (and other) resources we have that help us cope with stress is referred to as resilience.

Nature and resilience. Despite the many benefits of modern societies (e.g. longer life expectancy), the busy urban environments most people live in are also sources of stress. A growing body of research demonstrates that living near, spending time in, and even thinking about, natural spaces such as parks, gardens, mountains, lakes and the sea can help people cope better with these and other stressors. This was highlighted in many countries during the COVID pandemic. Put simply natural environments can build resilience. Moreover, as well as building psychological resilience (i.e. helping emotional coping) nature can also build biological resilience (e.g. through better immune systems) and social resilience (e.g. stronger local communities ties). In other words, nature can build ‘biopsychosocial resilience’ resources.

The data and end goal. The course is linked to an ongoing multi-country EU research project looking at nature-based resilience (https://resonate-horizon.eu/) that we are running from the University of Vienna. Using existing (secondary) data from an ongoing large survey (n < 20,000) run by the UK government, the aim of this course is for you to explore the relationships between various types of nature exposure (e.g. neighbourhood parks/gardens) for different groups (e.g. adults/children) and their beliefs about the biological, psychological and social resilience potential of these nature exposures. Although the UK government produces regular reports on these data, their summaries are largely descriptive and lack psychological insight, theory, or methods. Therefore, the aim of this course is for you (with weekly support) to produce genuinely novel analyses and results that, if all goes well, you could publish in the academic literature as a peer-reviewed paper. The course leader has already done this with earlier waves of the data so we know this is possible if you are up for it. Although we can make no promise at this stage, hopefully at the end of the course you will not only have an excellent course grade but also be a named co-author on a real-world psychology paper to add to your CV.

Feeling comfortable working with data and in teams. Participants should feel comfortable with basic descriptive data analysis (e.g. extracting means, SDs etc) as well as have some familiarity with inferential statistics (e.g. linear regression models). This doesn’t have to be perfect, we will offer extensive support to develop your skills, but an interest and willingness to analyse large datasets is essential. Analyses will be conducted in ‘R’ (with support from the team) so prior knowledge of R is an advantage but not essential. The statistical models we will develop together could theoretically be done in SPSS of JASP. Teams of 2-5 people will work together to develop the analysis plan and pre-registration, conduct presentations and write up the final report/paper. We realise group work can present challenges (e.g. social loafing) and not everyone loves it but this is how real papers with complex data like this are analysed and written up and we will be asking for a clear Author Contribution Statement outlining what each team member contributed to the report/paper (as happens with real papers).