Jessica Lorimer

Morality is a cornerstone of human social life, yet much of moral psychology has focused on in-lab experiments that trace its emergence in early childhood or manifestation in adulthood. In this study, we take an alternative approach, capturing real-time adolescent moral experiences via ecological momentary assessment (Nsample = 189, Nage = 12-18 years, Nresponses = 2,518). Contrary to the assumption that morality emerges rarely in daily life, adolescents reported morally-valenced events frequently and with rich emotional and relational content. These findings offer new insight into how young people perceive, interpret, and moralize everyday social encounters.

Background: Adolescent mental health difficulties are rising in the UK, yet school-based provision is limited. Nature-based Programmes (NbPs) are increasingly promoted as alternative or supplementary interventions for Mental Health and Wellbeing (MHWB), but evidence in secondary schools is under-explored. Aim: In this scoping review, we map existing NbPs in secondary school contexts; identify reported outcomes for mental health, wellbeing, and learning; and assess evidence quality for NbPs in secondary-school provision. Methods: We followed PRISMA-ScR guidelines (protocol: https://osf.io/qczas), searching five databases and the grey literature. Eligible studies reported school-based NbPs for students aged 10–18. The review process included screening, data extraction, and appraisal (using MMAT), and was co-produced with policymakers, educators, and young people. Results: From 17,723 records, 22 studies were included. NbPs encompassed school gardening, outdoor education, conservation, forest pedagogy, recreation in nature, and passive nature engagements. Most NbPs were delivered weekly on school grounds or in local greenspaces. Reported MHWB outcomes included reduced anxiety and stress, improved self-esteem and resilience, enhanced prosocial behaviour and school connectedness, and enhanced nature connectedness. Evidence for academic outcomes was mixed, with modest gains in science engagement and arithmetic but little evidence of broader academic performance benefits. Overall study quality was moderate, with small samples, limited use of control groups, and heterogeneity in outcome metrics. Conclusion: NbPs show promise for supporting adolescent MHWB in secondary schools, with school and nature connectedness emerging as potential mediators. However, evidence for cognitive and academic gains remains limited. In future, robust, UK-based Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) with standardised outcome measures are needed to assess efficacy of NbPs.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the field of empirical bioethics requires methodological innovations that can keep up with the scale and pace of contemporary research in health and medicine. With that in mind, we have recently argued for Design Bioethics—the use of purpose‐built, engineered research tools that allow researchers to investigate moral decision‐making in ways that are embodied and contextualized. In this paper, we outline the development, testing and implementation of a novel prototype tool in the Design Bioethics Workshop—with each step illustrated with collected data. Titled ‘Tracing Tomorrow’ (www.tracingtomorrow.org), the tool is a narrative game to investigate young people's values and preferences in the context of digital phenotyping for mental health. The process involved (1) Working with young people to discover, validate and define the morally relevant cases or problems, (2) Building and testing the game concept in collaboration with relevant groups and game developers, (3) Developing prototypes that were tested and iterated in partnership with groups of young people and game developers and (4) Disseminating the game to young people to collect data to investigate research questions. We argue that Design Bioethics yields tools that are relevant, representative and meaningful to target populations and provide improved data for bioethics analysis.Patient or Public Contribution: In planning and conducting this study, we consulted with young people from a diverse range of backgrounds, including the NeurOX Young People's Advisory Group, the What Lies Ahead Junior Researchers Team, Censuswide youth participants and young people from the Livity Youth Network.

Research in bioethics largely relies on interviews and surveys, which engage participants with scenarios that are distal in time and place to an actual situation. However, context and embodiment are relevant to moral decision-making. Due to the potential to immerse participants in a simulated environment, purpose-built games and scenarios might prove valuable as empirical tools. As a case study of gamifying bioethics, we describe the co-design and implementation of "What Lies Ahead?", a digital role-play scenario for research with adolescents. "What Lies Ahead?" engages young people with ethical issues related to predictive technologies in psychiatry. As preliminary evidence of the validity of this gamified approach, we report qualitative results suggesting that the role-play was immersive, and elicited authentic responses and reflective thinking in adolescent participants. Even though application of game-play mechanics is rare in bioethics, we find digital role-play to be a powerful tool that collects data through real-time, realistic scenarios.

Context: The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to be heard in all matters affecting them. The Convention inspired a surge in research that investigates young people's perspectives on health and wellness‐related concerns and that involves children as ‘co‐researchers'. Young people's advisory groups (YPAGs) are a widely used method to enable young people's involvement in all research stages, but there is a lack of academic literature to guide researchers on how to set up, run and evaluate the impact of such groups.Objective: In this paper, we provide a step‐by‐step model, grounded in our own experience of setting up and coordinating the Oxford Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Young People's Advisory Group (NeurOx YPAG). This group supports studies at the intersection of ethics, mental health and novel technologies. Our model covers the following stages: deciding on the fit for co‐production, recruiting participants, developing collective principles of work, running a meeting and evaluating impact.Results: We emphasize that throughout this process, researchers should take a critical stance by reflecting on whether a co‐production model fits their research scope and aims; ensuring (or aspiring to) representativeness within the group; valuing different kinds of expertise; and undertaking on‐going evaluations on the impact of the group on both the young people and the research.Conclusion: Adopting a critical and reflective attitude can increase researchers' capacity to engage youth in democratic and inclusive ways, and to produce research outputs that are aligned with the target audience's needs and priorities.

Online advertising is an important tool that can be utilized by charities to elicit attention and funding. A critical examination of advertisement strategies is thus necessary to increase the efficacy of fundraising efforts. Previous studies have shown that individuals’ moral views and perceptions of social norms can play important roles in charitable behavior. Thus, the current protocol describes a study to examine whether framing charitable advertisements in line with participants’ morality and increasing the salience of descriptive social norms increases subsequent charitable behavior. We describe experimental, online methods, whereby participants are provided with a framed call-to-action and normative information within a custom-developed application or existing survey platform. Furthermore, in the exploratory fashion, we discuss the possibility of collecting participants’ Facebook data and predicting moral profiles from this data. If there is an increased rate of donations as a result of moral compatibility and/or increased norm salience, charities can leverage this knowledge to increase the donations by tailoring their campaigns in a more appealing way for their prospective donors. Moreover, if it turns out to be possible to predict one’s moral profile from Facebook footprints, charities can use this knowledge to find and target people that are more likely to support their cause. However, this introduces important ethical questions that are discussed within this protocol.

Inducing emotional reactions toward social groups can influence individuals’ political tolerance. This study examines the influence of incidental fear and happiness on adolescents’ tolerant attitudes and feelings toward young Muslim asylum seekers. In our experiment, 219 16- to 21-year-olds completed measures of prejudicial attitudes. After being induced to feel happiness, fear, or no emotion (control), participants reported their tolerant attitudes and feelings toward asylum-seeking young people. Participants assigned to the happiness condition demonstrated more tolerant attitudes toward asylum-seeking young people than did those assigned to the fear or control conditions. Participants in the control condition did not differ from participants in the fear condition. The participants in the happiness condition also had more positive feelings toward asylum-seeking young people than did participants in the control condition. The findings suggest that one way to increase positive attitudes toward asylum-seeking young people is to improve general emotional state.