Applied Psychology Graduate Awarded Highly Commended at Global Undergraduate Awards
Recent graduate of BSc (Hons) in Applied Psychology, Kate Naugton has been awarded highly commended on her final year project in the prestigious Global Undergraduate Awards.
Kate’s project was titled ‘The Impact of Urban environments and Nature relatedness on direct attention restoration’ and was supervised by Dr Irene Connolly. The project was a combination of both Environmental and Educational Psychology. Her study examined the impact of exposure to both a natural virtual environment and urban virtual environment on the directed attention.
You can visit Kate’s graduate project here.
Dr Irene Connolly commented that ‘Environmental Psychology is a growing area of research, Kate took this idea during the pandemic, when our environments played a bigger role than ever before, with many people turning to nature in both urban and rural areas during lockdowns’.
The findings of Kate’s research could have implications in both education and the workplace, where she suggested that educators and employers could adopt environmental exposure as a strategy to invest in physical and cognitive recovery.
Ms. Sinéad Meade, co-ordinator of the BSc (Hons) Applied Psychology degree at IADT, added that ‘It is admirable that Kate and her supervisor have produced such a pertinent, high quality project under the challenging circumstances of the pandemic’.