Wednesday 22 July 08:15
- 09:45
Hall: 24 - Room 3 SPT
Chair:
White Mathew
Division: Division 4: Environmental Psychology
Numerous mechanisms have been proposed to explain why natural environments are beneficial for psychological health and well-being. According to nature-based biopsychosocial resilience theory (NBRT) nature promotes health/wellbeing by building and maintaining biological (e.g. healthy immune system), psychological (e.g. adaptive emotion regulation strategies), and social (e.g. local social capital) resilience-related resources, that can be utilized at three stages in the homeostatic-stress cycle, i.e. preventive resilience, response resilience, and recovery resilience. We presents five papers which test different aspects of NBRT as part of the EU-UK funded 'Building individual and community RESilience thrOugh NATurE-based therapies' (RESONATE) project. Paper 1 describes the theory and the development of a scale to measure its central tenets. Paper 2 presents cross-sectional data from > 30,000 participants in the UK which explores how spending time in gardens, and especially pro-environmental gardening, can build biopsychosocial resilience resources that can be used to mitigate the negative impact of low income on well-being. Paper 3 uses a 10-year longitudinal prospective cohort study to test how older adults in England coped during the Covid-19 pandemic as a function of the biopsychosocial resilience resources they had built up before the pandemic started. Paper 4 tests the theory using a two-arm randomized controlled study for people with metabolic syndrome which compared engaging in a 5-week nature-based mindfulness intervention with a wait-list control arm. Paper 5 tests the theory using a four-arm randomized controlled study for people with high stress levels which compared engaging in a 5-week nature-based mindfulness intervention with a 5-week nature-contact (no mindfulness) condition, a 5-week mindfulness (no nature) condition and a wait-list control arm. Combined, the results of the studies highlight the benefits of using novel theory to develop a coherent research framework to help design and conduct studies that have direct impact in terms of research, practice, and policy.
