Environmental psychology

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is an emerging and disruptive technology that has attracted considerable interest from researchers and educators across various disciplines. We discuss the relevance and concerns of ChatGPT and other GAI tools in environmental psychology research. We propose three use categories for GAI tools: integrated and contextualized understanding, practical and flexible implementation, and two-way external communication. These categories are exemplified by topics such as the health benefits of green space, theory building, visual simulation, and identifying practical relevance...

BACKGROUND: The repercussions of food insecurity are widely recognized to negatively impact overall health and are influenced by a complex interplay of physiological, psychological, social, and environmental factors. METHODS: This study examined the disparities in food consumption and literacy between among food security households and food insecurity households using data from the Korea Rural Economic Institute's 2022 Consumer Behavior Survey for Food, which involved 3,321 respondents...

This study investigated how relocation patterns affect disaster survivors' psychological stress on the diverse durations and spaces of relocation. It analyzed a 10-year data set of 1,236 families affected by 2009's Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan, identifying six relocation patterns through dynamic time warping (DTW). A hierarchical linear model was utilized, revealing the discernible impacts of environmental factors, sociocultural factors, and family-level socioeconomic factors on psychological stress. The study revealed that survivors who quickly found stable residences after the disaster initially experienced lower stress levels, but in the long term, their stress increased...

Independent locomotion is associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes, but unlike cognitive, linguistic, and social skills, acquiring motor skills requires infants to generate their own input for learning. We tested factors that shape infants' spontaneous locomotion by observing forty 12- to 22-month-olds (19 girls, 21 boys) during free play. Infants were recruited from the New York City area, and caregivers reported that 25 infants were White, six were Asian, four were Black, and five had multiple races; four were Hispanic or Latino...

Positive and negative aspects of intimate relationships influence mental health and well-being in couples. According to the environmental sensitivity framework, individuals differ in how strongly they are affected by their environment, with some individuals being more or less sensitive to both negative and positive experiences. The present study examined the longitudinal associations between positive and negative relationship dynamics, including marital satisfaction, positive bonding, and negative communication, and psychological distress as well as the extent to which individual differences in genetic and subjective measures of environmental sensitivity moderated the association between relationship dynamics and psychological distress in a sample of couples in the U...

Bilingual environments provide a commonplace example of increased complexity and uncertainty. Learning multiple languages entails mastery of a larger and more variable range of sounds, words, syntactic structures, pragmatic conventions, and more complex mapping of linguistic information to objects in the world. Recent research suggests that bilingual learners demonstrate fundamental variation in how they explore and learn from their environment, which may derive from this increased complexity. In particular, the increased complexity and variability of bilingual environments may broaden the focus of learners' attention, laying a different attentional foundation for learning...

Climate change has emerged as a tough challenge affecting the world's society and economy in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it has been determined that global warming and climate change have detrimental effects on human health both physical and psychological. In this framework, eco-anxiety has emerged as a new construct to assess the distress in relation to climate change and its effects. In the current article, after a study of the literature regarding both eco-anxiety and generativity related to environmental issues, in the search for a healthy response to eco-anxiety, we propose the construct of eco-generativity as a sustainable development-related concept for the health of planet earth and people in the present and in the future...

OBJECTIVES: Addressing the lack of German-language instruments, this study aims to develop a questionnaire that enables the measurement of work values. According to the theory of basic human values (Schwartz, 1992), a culturally fitting questionnaire is validated by covering constructs in the four broader dimensions of Social, Prestige, Intrinsic, and Extrinsic work values. Convergent, discriminant and incremental congruent validity are assessed. METHOD: Data were collected in a cross-sectional online-based panel survey...

INTRODUCTION: Interoception, the perception of the internal state of the body, has been shown to be closely linked to emotions and mental health. Of particular interest are interoceptive learning processes that capture associations between environmental cues and body signals as a basis for making homeostatically relevant predictions about the future. One method of measuring respiratory interoceptive learning that has shown promising results is the Breathing Learning Task (BLT). While the original BLT required binary predictions regarding the presence or absence of an upcoming inspiratory resistance, here we extended this paradigm to capture continuous measures of prediction (un)certainty...

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to assess quality of life (QoL) using the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire among obstetric fistula (OF) patients before and after surgical repair of OF (SROF). METHODS: A longitudinal cohort study was conducted between November 2022 and October 2023 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) among OF patients to assess their QoL before and after SROF. A systematic sampling technique was used to recruit a total of 158 OF patients. The WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire assessed general health, life experience, as well as physical, social, psychological, and environmental domains...

OBJECTIVE: Waste sorting has received considerable attention in recent decades. However, research on the mechanisms underlying the relationships among cultural worldview, environmental risk perception, and waste sorting is rather scarce. This study aims to explore the cultural worldviews, environmental risk perception, and waste sorting among urban Chinese and their mechanisms. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study involving 744 urban Chinese residents (371 men and 373 women)...

PURPOSE: We evaluated the efficacy of megestrol in improving chemotherapy-related anorexia by analyzing the related scales of taste alteration. METHODS: We conducted the current study on a group of advanced patients with cancer with two or more chemotherapy cycles. The chemotherapy-induced taste alteration scale (CiTAs) scale helped assess the megestrol effects on basic taste perception, aversive taste changes, unpleasant symptoms, and associated concerns. Furthermore, the Short Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire scale (SNAQ) helped measure the impact of megestrol on malnutrition likelihood in patients experiencing chemotherapy-induced anorexia...

Restraint, often linked with limiting an individual's freedom of movement, has become a focal point of extensive discussion and evaluation within the realm of mental healthcare. Striking a delicate balance between ensuring individual safety and minimizing reliance on restraint methods poses a significant challenge. In mental health inpatient settings, the prevalent forms of restraint encompass physical, chemical, environmental, and psychological methods. Paradoxically, the consequences of employing restraint can be severe, ranging from injuries and cognitive decline to sedation and, in extreme cases, fatalities...

INTRODUCTION: Chronic pain can profoundly affect the wellbeing of dogs and our understanding is limited regarding the multidimensional impact it has on dog quality of life. This study aimed to assess the factors that are significant and predictive of behavior problems in dogs using the Animal Welfare Assessment Grid (AWAG) to further understand what factors influence their welfare. METHODS: Seventy six AWAG assessments were undertaken across 46 dogs that clinicians diagnosed as having musculoskeletal conditions that caused chronic pain...

Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are a clinical challenge for the lack of a sound taxonomy, frequent presentation with comorbid BPSD, lack of specific pharmacologic interventions, poor base of methodologically sound evidence with randomized clinical trials, contamination from the treatment of behavioural disturbances of young and adult psychiatric conditions, and small efficacy window of psychotropic drugs. We present here a treatment workflow based on a concept-driven literature review based on the notions that (i) the aetiology of BPSD can be mainly neurobiological (so-called 'primary' symptoms) or mainly environmental and functional ('secondary' symptoms) and that this drives treatment; (ii) the clinical efficacy of psychotropic drugs is driven by their specific profile of receptor affinity; (iii) drug treatment should follow the rules of 'start low-go slow, prescribe and revise'...

OBJECTIVE: Suicide is the leading cause of death among the working-age population in Japan. Unlike task-level occupational factors, the relation between suicidal ideation and psychosocial safety climate (PSC), a crucial organization-level factor to protect workers' psychological health, is understudied, especially among teleworkers. METHODS: A cross-sectional web-based survey was used to select 1,988 participants. A series of multivariable logistic regression analyses with the interaction term of PSC and teleworking arrangements was performed...

Climate change is widely recognised as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated stimuli that would make studying such a topic in experimental settings possible. Here, we introduce a novel Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set. ECCS consists of 180 realistic short stories about climate change, designed to evoke five distinct emotions-anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope-in addition to neutral stories...

BACKGROUND: Disability is a serious health issue that can have a significant impact on both physical and mental health. This study attempted to investigate the relationship between depression, quality of life (QOL), and COVID-19 challenges faced by people with disabilities (PwD) from Saudi Arabia. METHODS: A structured interview questionnaire to measure QOL (WHOQOL-BREF) and depression (PHQ-9) was used to conduct a cross-sectional study among PwDs in Saudi Arabia...

Sleep disorders are prevalent and often neglected among breast cancer patients. This study aimed to identify the association among perceived stress, loneliness, resilience and sleep disorders and to further explore whether resilience could be a moderator in the association between them and sleep disorders. A cross-sectional study was conducted by 492 female breast cancer patients. Patients were asked in response to the questionnaires including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Perceived Stress Scale-10, the Three-Item Loneliness Scale and Resilience Scale-14...

OBJECTIVES: COVID-19 affects the quality of life (QoL) in a reverse way after recovery, which might be multiplied by the comorbid non-communicable diseases. This study explored the relationship between comorbidities and the QoL of people who recovered from COVID-19 in Bangladesh. METHODS: The cross-sectional study was conducted among 3244 participants between June 2020 and November 2020 using a pre-tested questionnaire through over-the-phone interviews. The WHOQOL-BREF was used to explore the QoL among the study participants...