Towards a new cognition
Our cognitive system is a changing object, and digital media highlight this plastic nature even more. Recent years have seen extensive debate as to how technology, particularly the Internet, affects the way our cognitive processes work: how do we save information in our memory and how do we recall it when we use technology? Can we run an Internet search at the same time as answering whatsapps, paying attention to both tasks? Is it true that Google is dumbing us down? Do we all use technology in the same way, irrespective of our personality?
Contact: Modesta Pousada (mpousada@uoc.edu)
Network Promotion of quality life styles
The aim of these programmes is, generally, to have an effect on the quality of life both of patients and their carers by working on some important psychological variables.
The results of the research should contribute to improving quality of life for users and also to guiding administrations in the use of ICTs for health promotion in the broadest sense.
This line of research takes the form of the following sub-lines:
Quality of life in those caring for children with chronic disorders. An intervention via the internet. The intention is that this sub-line focusing on parents caring for children with cerebral palsy should work in depth on discovering the important variables relating to the effects of caring tasks and on designing online interventions that could improve carers' health and quality of life.
Patients' associations and ICTs. APTIC project. APTIC is a social network aimed at members of associations of patients, mothers, fathers and professionals involved with the care of children and young people suffering from chronic diseases. Its modular structure and the possibility of working together with a community of developers from all over the world allow a versatile, dynamic tool providing a response to the changing needs of different users.
Development of an online intervention for people with chronic pain. In this sub-line we are working on designing online intervention programmes aimed at secondary prevention for children and teenagers with chronic pain problems. First, we also want to explore the likely acceptance of a programme of this kind in different contexts (example: people suffering from the problem, health professionals, etc.).
Mental health, teenagers and ICTs. Work is beginning on a research sub-line intended to have an effect on prevention and interventions related to mental health problems in children and teenagers. Design work is starting on an online intervention aimed at teenagers with anxiety problems and at using social networks to prevent mental health problems in teenagers.
Psychology 2.0 and MHEALTH
The use of technology to promote people's health and quality of life has opened up a new field of action: psychology 2.0. ICT offers increasingly more usable solutions, and the emergence of mobile apps (mHealth), and especially health-related apps and web apps, are changing psychology towards a new 2.0 focus. How should we develop an app to improve sticking to a treatment? How can we assess the efficiency of an app aimed at reducing blood glucose levels? How can we invigorate a social network to increase resilience among chronic patients?
Contact: Manuel Armayones (marmayones@uoc.edu)
Health education ad Social Media
Social media platforms and tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo, the use of WhatsApp, and also various types of patients' platforms and schools, comprise ideal arenas for education for health. A number of government agencies and organizations presently have profiles and pages on various social media with an extensive number of followers and active participants.
The study, both of the nature and of the usefulness of this type of educational work, at times aimed at informing and educating based on health conditions, other times at community intervention, and still others at raising awareness of various problems, should enable us to identify best practices and acquire useful knowledge for the design, implementation and assessment of these types of initiative in education for health.
Contact: Manuel Armayones (marmayones@uoc.edu)
Sports, health and quality of life
This line of research seeks to study the practice of sport as a key element in improving the quality of life and health of the population. Far from the competition scenario, a healthy lifestyle based on practising sport helps prevent and treat diseases and provides physical, psychological and social benefits.
Contact: Mercè Boixadós (mboixados@uoc.edu)
Values through sports
This line of research seeks to study how values are conveyed through the practice of sport. It is based on the idea that sport for children and teenagers could be the appropriate place for fostering the positive moral development of young people in every dimension. This calls for the identification of the principles and strategies that will help us create a positive psychological climate during the practice of sport.
Contact: Mercè Boixadós (mboixados@uoc.edu)
ICT in education contexts and basic psychological processes
The use of ICT in the classroom opens up a great many research possibilities and offers countless experiences that could be analysed from their most basic perspective, namely how this use might affect psychological processes such as thought, reasoning, memory, attention span, etc. Does Scratch programming influence the ability to reason? Does working with tablets help maintain children's attention? Do children who commonly work with computers improve their cognitive skills in thought or in language?
Contact: Beni Gómez-Zúñiga (bgomezz@uoc.edu)
Adolescence on the net
This research project is primarily aimed at improving the health of adolescents through ICT and proposes designing a health portal to meet their information, counselling and support needs. A needs analysis was completed through a survey on the use of the Internet and social networks for health issues among students aged 12 to 18 from a number of schools throughout Catalonia and in-depth interviews with groups of young people on this subject. The results are currently being analysed. The aim of this project is to define this use of the Internet and social networks for health issues among adolescents, how they view the need for help and their opinion on the possibility of implementing an Internet health service designed to meet their needs.
Through this project, we will be answering questions such as what adolescents want a health website to be like, how we can teach young people to look for quality health resources on the Internet and if the quality criteria area the same for young people as they are for adults in terms of health resources. We will also be working on the design of online health resources for adolescents and promoting networking among students, teachers and professionals to improve information regarding children and adolescent health.
Contact: Noemí Guillamón (nguillamon@uoc.edu)
Psychopathologies of infants and youths
The aim of this line of research is to take an in-depth look at the mental health of children and adolescents. The key questions and central themes on which the research must focus are: What are the overriding mental health problems among children? Are there any differences according to age and gender? What are the most common risk factors? What is the role of the social and family context regarding the origins and maintenance of these difficulties? The purpose is to analyse, design and apply proposals to promote mental health among children and adolescents and for education regarding children and adolescent health and psychological interventions aimed at this population.
Contact: Noemí Guillamón (nguillamon@uoc.edu)
Ageing and ICT
Seniors use ICT in different areas of their everyday lives: communication, health, to control their environment, leisure and education. Attitudes, expectations, needs and emotions are some of the psychological aspects that may explain how seniors view ICTs and their subjective experience of them. What psychological variables determine how seniors use ICT? Where does their need to use ICT come from? Has ICT changed the lives of seniors? In what way?
Contact: Eulàlia Hernández (ehernandez@uoc.edu)
Development of interventions for chronic pain sufferers
This line focuses on designing online interventions for people with chronic pain. A programme for children with abdominal pain is currently being developed, but the aim of the group is to provide treatments for other populations with chronic pain. How these programmes would be accepted in different contexts is also being studied (e.g. people suffering from the same problem, healthcare professionals, etc.).
Contact: Rubén Nieto (rnietol@uoc.edu)
Health and quality of life at work: risk factors and intervention
Nowadays, people's health, quality of life and wellbeing are determined due to a number of factors, among which the work dimension is probably one of the most decisive. Advances in knowledge of the phenomena of stress and of psychosocial risks are fundamental to improving the increasingly longer working life of people. Consequently, this line of research was designed with the aim of examining these phenomena, as well as the personal, social and organizational factors that may contribute to them, and of fostering people's health and wellbeing in their work environment.
Contact: Beatriz Sora (bsora@uoc.edu)
Applied positive psychology: personal and profesional development
This line of research is focused on studying human abilities and strengths with the aim of promoting the healthy development and psychological wellbeing of people. Consequently, unlike the traditional perspective of psychology, focused on the shortcomings and risks associated with human beings, this new approach centres not only on the processes that prevent disorders, but also on those that enable the development of positive human potential. This research tackles aspects in both the personal and the professional life of the individual, such as resilience (the ability to cope with change and adversity in a way that leads to personal enrichment and improvement), emotional intelligence and job crafting (behavioural changes that the individual generates to adapt their work to their personal objectives and abilities).
Contact: Beatriz Sora (bsora@uoc.edu)
"Social Media" and rare or minority diseases
Rare or minority diseases occur in less than 1 in every 2,000 people. These diseases lie in the so-called long tail of our health systems, with the effects this has at different levels. Personalised care and clinical research is extremely complex because of the lack of a clear return on investment. There is also much less health information about these diseases than there is about very prevalent diseases, although high-quality resources do exist.
The social media have now become a catalyst for autonomy in patients with rare diseases. Nowadays, patients use online communities, such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or Linkedin, to work and communicate with one another. Designing and testing systems for personalising the experiences of each patient and/or family member can have positive effects on different variables. In addition, these 2.0 tools can also promote participation by patients and family members in activities aimed at boosting biomedical research, incorporating knowledge derived from collective intelligence, sharism, the patient-driven research model, participatory medicine, personalised social networking and captology, among others.
