This research directly assesses older people's neural activation in response to a changing urban environment while walking, as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). The study builds on previous research that shows changes in cortical activity while moving through different urban settings. The current study extends this methodology to explore previously unstudied outcomes in older people aged 65 years or more (n = 95). Participants were recruited to walk one of six scenarios pairing urban busy (a commercial street with traffic), urban quiet (a residential street) and urban green (a public park) spaces in a counterbalanced design, wearing a mobile Emotiv EEG headset to record real-time neural responses to place. Each walk lasted around 15 min and was undertaken at the pace of the participant. We report on the outputs for these responses derived from the Emotiv Affectiv Suite software, which creates emotional parameters ('excitement', 'frustration', 'engagement' and 'meditation') with a real-time value assigned to them. The six walking scenarios were compared using a form of high dimensional correlated component regression (CCR) on difference data, capturing the change between one setting and another. The results showed that levels of 'engagement' were higher in the urban green space compared to those of the urban busy and urban quiet spaces, whereas levels of 'excitement' were higher in the urban busy environment compared with those of the urban green space and quiet urban space. In both cases, this effect is shown regardless of the order of exposure to these different environments. These results suggest that
Neurourbanism looks to understand the relationship between urban environments and mental well-being and is well placed to assess the role of these environments on the urbanised and ageing global population. This study builds on research using mobile electroencephalography (EEG) to understand the impact of urban environments (busy, quiet and green urban spaces) on brain activity. Ninety-five older participants aged over 65 years undertook one of six walks in an urban neighbourhood, transitioning between two distinct environmental settings. This study explores changes in alpha (associated with relaxation) and beta (associated with attention) brain activity recorded during walking in differing urban environments. Neural activity significantly varies as participants walk between urban busy and green settings, with reduced levels of low beta activity in the green setting, suggesting attention changes consistent with Attention Restoration Theory. Levels of alpha activity significantly varied between the urban busy and the urban quiet settings, with increases in the urban busy setting. There were no significant differences in EEG activity between the urban green and urban quiet settings, suggesting that the magnitude of environmental contrast between the urban busy context and other urban settings is an important factor in understanding the effects of these spaces on brain activity.
Inactive lifestyles have negative health consequences, while time spent sedentary (sitting and lying) is related to morbidity and premature mortality. Older adults often form the most sedentary segment of the population. Much of this behaviour may be practised at home where this group can spend extended periods. Physical activity rates among older adults are particularly low. Even household physical activities can be beneficial for this group, while they can constitute much of an older person's total activity. Despite this context, the home's role in the active and sedentary behaviours of the older population appears critically understudied. Using interview and focus group data collected from 22 older adults (healthy volunteers, stroke survivors and people with dementia), this paper begins to address this issue. Aspects of the home that aid or impede a more active, less sedentary lifestyle are identified with three presenting particular capacity in this respect discussed: steps, space within the home, and the location and form of facilities, fixtures and fittings. The crucial role health status plays in structuring this capacity is identified. Simple design recommendations, devised to support older people to lead more active lives at home, are presented.
Few would deny that happiness arises from a complex interaction of internal and external factors, like optimism on the one hand and money on the other. Yet research, as well as practical strategies for promoting happiness, tends to focus narrowly on one side or the other. A typical study, for instance, might examine the correlation between happiness and an internal variable like optimism, or an external variable like income. And practical strategies commonly divide into "change the world" versus "change your mind" approaches: promote health and wealth, for example, or cultivate gratitude for what you already have. This paper explores how our understanding of happiness is enhanced by "interactionist" approaches that emphasize the complex webs of interactions and feedbacks that give rise to happiness and unhappiness. While implicitly interactionist themes have increasingly characterized research on happiness, we anticipate that an explicit recognition of the interactionist perspective will foster greater attention to the complexities of happiness, particularly in the domain of human sociality, which involves especially rich and potent webs of interaction. A further upshot, we believe, is a greater awareness of our co-responsibility for one another's happiness.
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This paper explores the contributions of sociology (and overlapping disciplines such as anthropology, social policy, and cultural studies) to happiness scholarship from the Enlightenment through to the present day. Pre-20th century thinkers whose work led to the formation of social science tended to take the theme of happiness seriously as a central challenge of social scholarship. Over the past century, sociologists have made important contributions to understanding happiness, although its absence from textbooks, encyclopedias, and conferences suggests that happiness has never been a major theme in mainstream sociology. The discipline's role in happiness scholarship could be greatly strengthened through more systematic and explicit approaches, especially in qualitative research. These will doubtless be developed soon, as sociology catches up with the other social sciences (most notably psychology and economics) that have already made great progress in convincing general publics and politicians that something so elusive as happiness can be analysed and assessed in robust and illuminating ways. A ‘happiness lens’ is recommended as a way of making sociology more transparent regarding its contributions to understanding and promoting good societies and good lives. This lens complements pathologism with positivity; insists on empathic effort to respect first-person subjectivity; and promotes holism and lifecourse perspectives.
Abstract:The analysis of numerical data from happiness surveys has caught the attention of governments, corporations, and public media. It is questionable, however, whether the humanistic and empathetic aspirations of happiness scholarship can be well served by numerical reductionism unless this is more effectively complemented by ethnobiographical approaches which explore how self-ratings emerge from cultural contexts and self-narratives. Happiness is imagined, generated, and expressed both through quantification and through stories. In scholarship, as in everyday life, we count and recount our blessings. This somewhat neglected distinction between numerical and narrative representations of happiness applies to conceptual, experiential, and methodological issues. It may help us to understand the social construction of happiness in cultural contexts, in conjunction with other distinctions such as those between affective and cognitive appraisals, and between hedonic and eudaimonic versions of the good life. There are potential synergies between psychometric and ethnobiographical approaches which could help us to recover some of the core humanistic values of the 'happiness lens', namely: empathy (respect for subjectivity); positivity (attention to goodness); holism; a lifespan perspective; and consequentialist transparency (making progressive intentions and causal theories explicit). Anthropology has good potential to help strengthen these values, particularly by using ethnobiography to help us understand what numerical representations of happiness mean.
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