Karl Maier

The Annual Scientific Conference of the American Psychosomatic Society, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Health-related disciplines increasingly recognize the foundational role of environmental and social conditions across problem areas in health. Comprehensive Health will be introduced as a heuristic term to communicate an all-encompassing paradigm of health and wellbeing across disciplines that is inclusive of environmental, social, and biobehavioral determinants. This can be operationalized with a biopsychosocial ecological (BPSE) framework to help visualize how the mechanisms and risk factors traditionally examined in biobehavioral medicine intersect with societal and environmental influences at multiple levels of analysis. Comprehensive Health thus provides simple language to support rapid adoption of a holistic understanding of health, whereas the BPSE framework provides a structure to visualize opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, and for organizing and sharing data and information in a problem-focused, transdisciplinary way.

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting,

Climate change is a complex phenomenon requiring multi or transdisciplinary understanding and response. Therefore, an ecological paradigm - reflecting that all things are interrelated - is best suited to capture the complex and diverse problem areas of climate change in order to facilitate integration across all relevant disciplines and levels of analysis.

An ecological paradigm that transcends disciplines can be operationalized using the biopsychosocial ecological (BPSE) framework that builds on the established biopsychosocial model from the field of biobehavioral medicine. The BPSE has recently been applied to the intersection of climate and health (Persad-Clem et al., 2022), and may effectively outline the drivers, impacts, and solutions related to climate change in general. The BPSE framework identifies bio-physical, psychological/behavioral, and social domains across distal, intermediate, proximal, and micro levels of analysis:

Distal: natural environmental systems and processes, and broad psychosocial constructs like attitudes, culture, national/global policy, and economics.
Intermediate: individual and community-level behavior, built environments, infrastructure, education, policies, and practices.
Proximal (person): individual biological, cognitive-emotional, and relationship systems.
Micro: particulate, microbiological, cellular, molecular, and smaller mechanisms.

Key factors in each area of the BPSE framework pertaining to climate change drivers, impacts, and solutions will be presented. A pilot database structured around the BPSE framework that is currently in development will also be presented: CLIMATE -Climate Literature Index for Multidisciplinary Author TEams (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2335532). CLIMATE is an online Zotero library for facilitating interdisciplinary work by organizing the extant climate change literature within a BPSE structure.

The BPSE framework can support a transdisciplinary and comprehensive ecological approach to climate change by encouraging the organization and integration of literature and knowledge, supporting gap analysis in research, facilitating creation of multidisciplinary research teams, and informing policy from a diverse set of perspectives.

https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm22/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1173773

Society of Behavioral Medicine Annual Meeting, Baltimore

Background: Engaging in behaviors to reduce one’s carbon footprint may be one way of actively coping with climate-related stress that also contributes to mitigation of climate change. In addition, mindfulness and the stages of change associated with the transtheoretical model have been applied to individual climate-related behavior (Barrett et al, 2016). We examined stage of engagement in personal action on climate change and degree of mindfulness in association with mental health indicators related to climate change, perceived impact of climate change on human civilization, and perceived negative personal impact. We hypothesized that greater mindfulness would be associated with less stress and greater hopefulness and self-efficacy about climate change. We then explored these factors according to stage of change.
Method: A sample of 766 U.S. based Amazon M-Turk workers who endorsed belief that climate change is happening (79% White or Caucasian; 65% women; age (M = 38.20, SD = 13.24, range = 18 to 78 years) completed an online Qualtrics survey. Participants completed the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale–Revised (CAMS-R; Feldman et al., 2006) and single-item scales assessing climate change-related stress, hopefulness, self-efficacy (perceived ability to do things to help slow global warming), impacts on human civilization, and personal negative impacts [0 (not at all) to 5 (very much)]. Participants also indicated if they had made lifestyle/behavioral changes (examples given) to reduce their “contribution of greenhouse gasses to help slow global warming or climate change” by endorsing one of 6 statements that operationalize the stages of change (precontemplation to termination).
Results: Mindfulness was negatively correlated with climate change stress (r = -.20) and personal impact (r = -.11), and positively correlated with hopefulness (r = .24) (p’s < .01) and self-efficacy (r = .08) (p < .05) related to climate change. Mean levels of mindfulness among those in the termination stage were greater than those in the contemplation, preparation, and action stage (p’s < .05), but not significantly different from those in the precontemplation or maintenance stages. Participants in the precontemplation stage reported the lowest levels of stress, self-efficacy, perceived personal and civilization impacts, and the greatest level of hopefulness (p’s < .001).
Conclusions: A disposition toward mindfulness may confer resilience against emotional impacts of climate change. Individuals not intending to make changes to their carbon footprint appear to have less distress than others who report being more ready or already engaged in change, consistent with their low perceived degree of climate impacts. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine if distress, self-efficacy, and perceived impact may motivate individuals to engage in climate-friendly behavior changes over time.