PS499 Unit 3 Literature Review Example

What Is Known About Awe, Walking and Night-Shift Stress: A PS499 Unit 3 Literature Review

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS499: Bachelor's Capstone in Psychology

Unit 3 Literature Review

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer and her crew are composite; every study reviewed is real.

Purpose and Approach

The question behind this review is whether short post-shift walks built around awe ease housekeepers' stress more than plain walks of equal length. This review examines four bodies of research that bear on the question. I searched the university library's psychology and health databases using combinations of awe, shift work, night shift, walking, nature, perceived stress and workplace intervention, and kept peer-reviewed studies and reviews that addressed one of the four themes.

Theme 1: Night Shift Work and Stress

Shift work, especially at night, places workers out of step with their biological clocks. Kecklund and Axelsson (2016) pulled together what is known about night and rotating schedules and short sleep, describing links with accidents, impaired performance, metabolic problems, cardiovascular disease and poorer mental health. They noted that the evidence was strongest for short-term effects of lost sleep and that long-term disease risks were real but harder to pin on shift work alone.

The review supports the premise that night workers face elevated stress and health risks, but it also shows a limit. Most research has studied nurses, factory workers and drivers, groups with more training, pay and visibility than the people who clean hospitals at night. Hospital housekeepers, who do physically demanding work with low pay and little control over their schedules, rarely appear as a group of their own. That gap matters, and it is not a small one, because the sources of stress for my crew, such as pressure to turn over rooms quickly and little recognition, differ from those of nurses.

Theme 2: Awe and Well-Being

A small but growing body of research links awe to outcomes relevant to stress. Across several experiments by Rudd et al. (2012), participants led to feel awe felt that they had more time available, were less impatient and reported greater momentary life satisfaction than people in other emotional states. Piff et al. (2015) showed that awe shrinks how large the self feels to the person, and that people in this state gave and helped more. Stellar et al. (2015) found that people who tended to feel awe more often had lower levels of a marker of inflammation, more strongly than for other positive emotions.

The awe studies agree on direction, more time, a smaller self and less inflammation, but most were brief laboratory sessions or surveys, not programs people repeated over weeks.

The most directly relevant study tested a repeated awe intervention. Sturm et al. (2022) asked healthy older adults to take a fifteen-minute outdoor walk each week for eight weeks. Half were taught to cultivate awe on their walks, by noticing vast and novel things, and half simply walked. The awe walk group reported more awe during walks, greater daily prosocial positive emotions such as compassion and gratitude, and less daily distress over time. Photographs they took of themselves showed bigger smiles and the self taking up less of the frame.

Sturm and colleagues' design is the model for my proposal: a short, repeated walk with a comparison walk. But their participants were older adults, mostly retired and well educated, walking at times of their choosing. Whether the effect holds for tired workers at the end of a night shift is unknown.

Theme 3: Walking, Nature and Rumination

Walking outdoors may reduce stress whether or not people feel awe. Bratman et al. (2015) randomly assigned participants to a ninety-minute walk in a natural area or along a busy road. Those who walked in nature reported less rumination afterward and showed reduced activity in a brain region associated with repetitive negative thinking, while the urban walkers did not. The study suggests that the setting of a walk matters, and that nature may interrupt the cycle of worry.

This finding complicates the capstone design. If walking outdoors reduces stress, then any benefit of awe walks must be shown against a comparison walk in a similar setting, so that awe itself, rather than walking or fresh air, is being tested. The hospital's parking ramp and river trail offer the same views to both groups, which helps. Both groups will also walk at the same hour, just after sunrise for much of the year, so that light and time of day are matched as well.

Theme 4: Workplace Stress Programs

Workplace programs to reduce stress have a substantial research base. Richardson and Rothstein (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of randomized studies of occupational stress management programs. They found that interventions had a medium to large effect on average, with cognitive-behavioral programs producing the largest effects and relaxation and other approaches producing smaller but meaningful effects. Programs that were shorter were not necessarily less effective.

The meta-analysis suggests that brief workplace interventions can reduce stress, but most programs it reviewed involved training sessions led by professionals, often for office workers. An awe walk program, led by a coworker and requiring no classroom time, would be a different kind of intervention, closer to an activity than a course.

Synthesis and Gap

Across the four themes, the research points the same way. Night workers face real stress and health risks. Awe produces effects, such as a smaller self and lower inflammation, that plausibly counter stress. Walks in nature reduce rumination. Brief workplace programs can reduce stress. But no study has combined these: no published trial has tested an awe intervention with shift workers, measured perceived stress as the main outcome in a workplace awe study, or compared awe walks with ordinary walks among people coming off a night shift.

The limits of the existing studies also guide the proposal. Samples have been mostly students, older adults and professionals, so a study of hospital housekeepers, many of them immigrants, would extend the research to a population it has overlooked. And because the effects of awe in laboratory studies are short-lived, the proposal should measure stress after several weeks of repeated walks rather than after a single one.

Conclusion

The literature gives the capstone a strong rationale and a design to borrow. It shows that awe, walking and brief workplace programs each have promise, and that no one has tested awe walks for night-shift workers. The proposal in Unit 4 will address that gap with a randomized comparison of awe walks and ordinary walks, measuring perceived stress over six weeks.

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567-8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112

Kecklund, G., & Axelsson, J. (2016). Health consequences of shift work and insufficient sleep. BMJ, 355, Article i5210. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i5210

Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883-899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018

Richardson, K. M., & Rothstein, H. R. (2008). Effects of occupational stress management intervention programs: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 13(1), 69-93. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.13.1.69

Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe expands people's perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130-1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612438731

Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129-133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033

Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Chow, T. E., Morris, N. A., Neuhaus, J., Kramer, J. H., Miller, B. L., Holley, S. R., & Keltner, D. (2022). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044-1058. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000876