A team from Stamford University have investigated the degree to which air quality can affect people’s mood, and how much that can vary on an individual basis.
Expanding upon the established links between exposure to air pollution and negative mental health consequences, the team have proposed a new construct they have named Affective Sensitivity to Air Pollution (ASAP) – the degree to which a person’s emotional states vary in response to changes in local air quality.
The unique element of ASAP is that goes further than examining differences in individuals’ exposures to air pollution, by examining the differences in their sensitivities to air pollution.
The sample for the study was 150 participants in Penn State’s Intraindividual Study of Affect, Health, and Interpersonal Behavior (iSAHIB) programme, who had completed three, 3-week ‘measurements bursts’ during which they reported on their social interactions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The Stamford team combined this data with that from United States’ Air Quality Index (AQI) and examined how variations in air quality impacted on two components of individuals’ affective state: arousal, the level of physiological activation, and valence, the positivity or negativity of their mood.
‘As expected,’ the paper explains, ‘we found that Affective Sensitivity to Air Pollution was indeed discernable, that the prototypical individual’s affect arousal was lower than usual on days with higher than usual air pollution, and that—most importantly—there were indeed substantial interindividual differences in ASAP for both affect arousal and affect valence.’
The team say that one of the implications of their findings is that ASAP could partially explain one of the mechanisms by which exposure to air pollution increases longer-term risk for adverse mental health outcomes, like symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Furthermore, although the whole sample lived in one geographic region (Pennsylvania) and experienced similar exposure to air pollution, they still presented different ASAP: ‘Aligning with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s redefinition of climate vulnerability, these interindividual differences in ASAP underscore the distinction between sensitivity and exposure to climate change.’
The full paper can be read here.
I wish that Dr Dick van Steenis (Times obituary 13 April 2013) could have read this article, particularly:
“The team say that one of the implications of their findings is that ASAP could partially explain one of the mechanisms by which exposure to air pollution increases longer-term risk for adverse mental health outcomes, like symptoms of anxiety and depression.”
https://airqualitynews.com/health/empowering-communities-with-knowledge-introduction-to-air-quality/#comment-104219
I had very little idea about the impact of air pollution on health before first speaking to the late Dr Dick van Steenis in January 2002.
Whenever he was told about health impacts of air pollution, he’d always ask: “What data have you to back-up that claim?”
In 1994, he was asked by the Campaign of the Protection of Rural Wales to be their medical consultant in their fight against the proposed burning of Orimulsion at National Power’s power station in Milford Haven.
Dr van Steenis mapped the childhood asthma rates of all parts of West Wales and the map, which clearly showed much higher rates in locations downwind of the power station and oil refineries in Milford Haven waterway. That map was on the front page of the Western Mail of 3 March 1995 and the solicitors acting on behalf of The Prudential then retained him as medical consultant (“Pru sues PowerGen in Fuel Row”, by Nick Nuttall, Times, 20 March 1995) in their civil action against Powergen, which had bene burning Orimulsion in Richborough Power Station.
Dr van Steenis obtained asthma rates in East Ken and parts of Holland and France which showed a sudden spike in rates after Powergen started burning Orimulsion.
Powergen settled out-of-court in 1997:
“A KENT farming family has won its High Court fight for compensation from electricity giant PowerGen.
Dennis and Sallie Clifton served a writ against the company in Feb 1995, claiming emissions from Richborough Power Station had damaged crops on 324ha (800-acre) Abbey Farm, Minster between 1991 and 1995.
At the time, Richborough was burning orimulsion, a controversial bitumen-based, Venezuelan fuel. The family also sought an injunction to stop use of the fuel at the site which, at its closest, is within a few hundred yards of their farm….continues”
https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/powergen-settles-kent-orimulsion-claim-out-of-court
In my earlier Air Quality News post above, I mentioned the West Wales asthma survey carried out by Dr van Steenis, which found a wide variation in childhood asthma rates upwind and downwind of the oil refineries and power station in Milford Haven waterway.
He later obtained the referral rates for clinical depression and saw that the referrral rate to a psychiatrist was nine times higher in the high asthma zones compared with the low asthma zones.
He then requested and obtained the hospital admission rates for cancer by broad post code and saw a twenty-fold difference between the high and low asthma zones. He told me that admission rates for cancer are higher than the cancer diagnosis rate as cancer patients attend hospital more than once a year.
He then requested the heart attack data by broad post-code and was denied access.
The above all took place in 1995