Monday, July 8, 2013

Beginnings!

Hello and welcome to my research blog! 

This summer I am working on a project looking at the psychological and mental health benefits nature provides us. For centuries, works of poets, musicians, and philosophers have asserted that spending time in nature is beneficial (anyone else read Thoreau in AP lit?). I imagine many of you have also had experiences where spending time outdoors led to you feeling refreshed and relaxed. But what aspects of psychological functioning are actually affected by nature experiences, and what is it about nature that causes these effects? Recently, a growing body of scientific work has begun to study nature's psychological benefits as well as look at whether being deprived from nature has negative implications. Some pretty awesome work has been done!* Yet, the answers to those questions are still largely unknown, so that's where we come in! By the way, 'we' refers to myself, Melissa Wibowo who is another undergraduate, and our research advisor Greg Bratman who is a PhD student in the E-IPER program. Together, we're working to better understand the rejuvenating powers of nature, and having a pretty great time in the process (so far anyways…). 

We're conducting two projects this summer to address our objective. One experiment involves investigating a potential theory for why nature experiences are beneficial. More on this later, but the theory essentially has to do with decreased self-awareness after spending time in nature. I spent most of my first week doing background reading and developing the experimental design for an online survey that will be a stepping stone for this experiment. Early last week Melissa and I created the survey, and while there are a few details to work out it should be ready to launch soon! 

Our primary experiment is looking at the psychological impacts of nature vs. urban walks. What's new and exciting about this project, is that we're collecting real-time data via use of an Android phone, rather than collecting only before-and-after data. We expect that real-time data will provide insight into when psychological functioning and mental health effects begin to take place, when they peak, and how they change throughout the experience. Essentially, we will send participants on either nature or urban walks with the Android, and will periodically "ping" them throughout their walks. Once "pinged," they will complete a series of assessments that measure various aspects of mood and cognitive functioning. The participants will take pictures of their location upon completing the assessments, and we hope to tie changes in mood and cognitive functioning to landscapes. We piloted this experiment on Wednesday to test out the experimental design and data collection with the Android. We have a few technical issues and design details to work out, but overall the pilot ran smoothly and was quite promising! I'm excited for week three! 

*Check out http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/easing-brain-fatigue-with-a-walk-in-the-park/ to read about a study that used portable EEGs to study cognitive impacts of green vs. urban spaces, and http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110622/full/474429a.html for a study that used fMRI to show how urban living affects the brain. Pretty crazy-cool stuff!

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