UPEI doctoral student wins award for poster presentation of dissertation
Allegra Netten, a fourth-year student in the UPEI doctor of psychology program, recently received a prestigious award for her poster presentation of her doctoral dissertation entitled The Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Climate Change Anxiety at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) in New York City.
Netten was one of only three students out of more than 100 to receive the 2022 ABCT Elsie Ramos Memorial Student Poster Award. This award is given to student first authors whose posters have been accepted for presentation at ABCT’s annual convention. The winners each receive an ABCT student membership and a complimentary general registration at next year’s ABCT’s annual convention.
The project involved the creation of a new scale to measure anxiety about climate change, said Netten, with the goal of improving our understanding of climate change anxiety. She reviewed the literature on climate change, mental health, and anxiety, and designed a questionnaire that was administered to Canadian adults through an online survey. Participants were asked to rate 35 statements that were intended to assess climate anxiety from various angles on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
“We were able to develop a scale that measures climate change anxiety reliably, with three subscales measuring different domains of climate change anxiety: clinical significance, existential, and cognitive and future focused. The scale tells us that climate change anxiety can be measured, that it can become clinically significant (seriously distressing or impairing functioning), and that it involves existential, physiological, and cognitive components.”
The scale can be used in the assessment and treatment of climate change anxiety and may also be useful in other areas of climate change research and advocacy, she said.
Netten’s ultimate goal is to find ways to help people who experience climate change anxiety in order to improve their well-being and make them feel empowered to make a difference in the world.
“Congratulations to Allegra for her novel and important work,” said Dr. Jason Doiron, associate professor of psychology and one of Allegra’s dissertation supervisors, “and for representing the Doctor of Psychology program so well at this important international conference!”
Netten’s research was supported by a grant from the Government of Prince Edward Island’s climate challenge fund.
