PSY 417: Science of Well-Being: Guidelines for Final Paper in the Land of COVID-19
Due 5/4
To make this class relevant to your life now, and to ensure this class is reducing rather than increasing your stress level, I offer you the following final project. Let’s call it “maintaining well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak.” Here are the guidelines:
1. Regardless of the uncertainty and strain of the current situation, you must spend some time to take care of yourselves. Choose 4 strategies to implement in your weekly routine for at least two months to focus on your well-being. It could be in the categories of exercising (e.g., meditation practice using apps and scripts to guide you, functional mobility routines, jogging/running, high intensity interval training, core workouts), socializing (e.g., facetime, calls, etc – try to aim for synchronous communication to get the most benefits of social connections), creative pursuits (e.g., trying new recipes, art, personal writing), paying attention and being mindful, donating your time energy and money, and engaging in personal growth activities such as learning a new language, how to play the guitar, how to skateboard, etc.
2. Be concrete about what you are integrating into your routine.
3. Keep a log of what you do and how it affected your 1) emotions 2) thoughts and 3) behavior. With particular attention to how it is helping you cope. Try to find some scales to measure whether these well-being strategies are working. At the minimum, record numbers to represent your daily stress and how this might be changing along with (positive and negative) emotions and thoughts. With numbers, you can graph what happened.
4. For the write-up. In the introduction, detail what you are going though — with particular emphasis on the unique difficulties experienced related to the COVID-19 outbreak. Talk about the disruptions. Talk about what you would be doing that you miss. Provide a clear rationale on why you chose the particular well-being activities to enter into your routine.
5. You will do the following:
a. A) Introduction: see above. Be detailed. Provide clear rationales. Use proper grammar and do not make spelling mistakes.
b. B) Methods: explain how you went about changing yourself. What techniques did you use? What is the psychology behind these techniques? How did you set up a measurement procedure? Be specific.
c. C) Results: What happened? Provide the results. Graph them.
d. D) Discussion: What have you learned about yourself and psychological interventions and change? Discuss what it was like to handle a major life event and dealing with being uprooted along with the uncertainty of the situation. Talk about your strengths and weaknesses, difficulties of changing habits, or you might explain why some techniques seemed to be more effective than others. Interpret and synthesize, don’t just reiterate the results.
e. Remember that your performance on this final project is not affected by whether anything that you implement works. If it doesn’t work, just detail in the Discussion why you think it did or did not work, and what you think might have happened if the COVID-19 outbreak didn’t happen or if you had more time.
Some general comments about the final paper:
–The most important thing about this paper is to show me you have learned to think like a scientist. Be sure to draw on many of the readings, and ideas that came up in class discussion.
–I’m expecting approximately 15 pages for the main text (assuming 11-point font). Appendices, such as charts of progress or daily data recording sheets, can be included in addition. Include a full set of references. Don’t cite things if you haven’t read them. It’s OK if some of these works were read for another class. I want you to integrate across classes.
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