Integrated Studies of Leisure and Environment on Human Health

Welcome to the Health, Environment, and Leisure (HEAL) Laboratory
In HEAL, we conduct integrated studies of human-environment interactions as they intersect with leisure and impact health and wellbeing. Drawing from knowledge and methods in psychology, public health, environmental epidemiology, human dimensions of natural resources, leisure sciences, education, and sociology, we employ a transdisciplinary approach to examine environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural conditions as well as individual-level factors that contribute to various mechanisms key to human health, wellbeing, and flourishing.  

To learn more about who we are, please visit our People page; to learn more about our work, please visit our Projects page. If you are interested in collaboration or becoming part of our lab, including becoming a graduate student or an undergraduate student research assistant, please visit Opportunities page or contact sharon.shen@oregonstate.edu.

HEAL Lab News

6/8/2022: Colby Parkinson successfully defended his Master thesis on Outdoor recreation during COVID-19: The role of adaptive strategies and associations with mental health! Colby is graduating with a M.S. degree from OSU this summer and will join the doctoral program in Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management at Penn State University with a Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Triple congrats, Colby!

5/25/2022: Congrats to Colby Parkinson for receiving the 2022 Outstanding Graduate Student Award in the FES Department, College of Forestry! This award acknowledges his exceptional scholastic ability, work ethic, and department citizenship.

5/23/2022: The HEAL lab's research project, Playful Parents: The development and empirical evaluation of a play intervention program to enhance playfulness for parents of children with disabilities, was awarded with funding by Good Samaritan Hospital Foundation John C. Erkkila, M. D. Endowment for Health and Human Performance. The project will be led by Drs. Xiangyou Shen (PI) and Megan MacDonald (Co-PI).

February, 2022: The story about our pandemic leisure study was featured by more media: Medical Xpress, Mirage (Australia), EurekAlert! (The American Association of the Advancement of Science), NEWSBREAK, UK Today News, and KOIN 6.

2/24/2022: The HEAL lab's study on pandemic leisure, a part of the Play2Cope project, was featured in The World.

1/31/2022: Dr. Xiangyou Shen was an invited speaker at the Health & Development Lab in Florida International University to talk about the complexity and promises of adult play and playfulness.

1/13/2022: The first set of findings from the Play2Cope project is published in the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, "Leisure Engagement during COVID-19 and Its Association with Mental Health and Wellbeing in U.S. Adults". The paper is open access!