Building Better Than We Know: The Built Environment, Trust, Social Behaviour, Biology and Health

My proposed project aims to formulate and empirically test, through experimental and observational studies, a plausible process theory to account for how the built environment - as an index of the social environment - "gets under the skin" and affects social behaviour, attitudinal states, and health.
In addition, my proposed project aims to also examine the relative contribution of the built environment on both subjective and objective measures of health.
I will focus on better understanding how aspects of the social environment are crystallised in the built environment, and in particular the proximate environmental, perceptual and biological mechanisms that account for how our interaction with the built environment modulates our social behaviour, attitudinal states, and health (a biologically plausible process theory of community perception grounded in the active inference framework).
Levels of personal and social trust are the key attitudinal factors that affect rates of prosocial behaviour (Nettle, 2015). In communities with low levels of trust - and correspondingly low levels of prosocial behaviour - multiple sources of chronic stress can result, which in turn lead to well established biological changes to the body's immune system (Prior, Manley, & Jones, 2018). This typically results in negative health consequences across the life course (Pearlin, Schieman, Fazio, & Meersman, 2005).
Thus, a better understanding of the contribution the built environment has on trust - that is an understanding of the proximate mechanisms that account for how the built environment "get under the skin" - will help illuminate one pathway through which the social environment and health are linked.

Experimental study
Does using a biometric measure of attention validate the findings of the self-report measures from the foundational work on community perception?
Does the inclusion of measures for life history schedule, socioeconomic position, and mental health, in addition to a measure of the urban character and density of the built environment of one's developmental setting (following O'Brien et al.'s study, and reviewed above [2014]), contribute to accounting for some of the hitherto unexplained variance in the foundational work on local adaptations in community perception?
Does an approach informed by recent work by Karl Friston and colleagues (the AI framework) afford a refinement to the predictions made in the foundational work on community perception?

I will use the biometric measure of eye tracking which, as foregrounded above, is a methodology well placed to experimentally investigate the construct of community perception.

Observational study
Do participants exposed to more cues of disorder in their neighbourhood have objectively poorer physical health?
Do participants exposed to more cues of disorder in their neighbourhood have subjectively poorer mental and physical health?
Do participants exposed to more cues of disorder in their neighbourhood rate the quality of their neighbourhood according to the predictions of community perception?
Are there certain categories of participants (e.g., single women or married mothers) where levels of disorder matters more?

My proposed study would draw upon data from waves 2 and 3 of the UK Household Longitudinal Study; a nationally representative study of over 100 000 individuals in 40 000 households. I plan to use the C-reactive protein biomarker data, a marker of inflammation indicative of infection or stress, from the Nurse Health Assessment subsample (n = 11,781); a selection which determines my sample size. I will spatially link these individual-level data with the study's metadata on household and area level factors regarding the visual diet of the built environment in which the participants reside (data collected by the NatCen interviewers who delivered the survey via the Address Record Forms).