Is there any research about effect of unfamiliar environment on stress?

Question

It seems intuitive to me that there is some kind of stress when one is put in an unfamiliar place (There's probably effect on cognitive abilities too). However, I can't find any paper in psychology which discusses that potential relationship.

Answer 1

I empathize with what it's like attempting to find specific research. This is especially so when I think I have found nothing useful for a research project. I have some tips to help you improve your experience here. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that you may have done these steps already. I just ask that you read with interest for steps you may not have tried yet.

First, go to your preferred library or library's website. You are then going to want to access the academic search database that is enabled for your use. This could be Academic Search Complete / EBSCO, Jstor, Google Scholar, or any other number of databases.Once logged into the academic database, look for options that allow you to enhance your search:

1. Can you enable it to show you references for articles that are not immediately available as a PDF? Save these citations and allow a librarian to help you request the articles.
2. Can you adjust the search parameters for dates when articles were published? Although we like to look for research relevant within the past 10 years, perhaps none was published within the past ten years. Expand your search by date and pick what articles seem relevant. You're going to want to discuss this limitation, and why you used older articles, in your paper - if so.
3. Can you narrow or expand the types of journals you can access? Perhaps some useful research has not been published recently within a psychology journal. But other journals, such as those on the topics of nursing, sociology, biology (etc.) may have something useful.
4. Adjust your search terms. What are synonyms for "stress?" What terms are synonymous with "unfamiliar environment?"

For example, my EBSCO search results for the terms you used yielded a study by Lewis and Phillips (2013) about stress experienced by cardiac patients when in unfamiliar environments. You may be able to extrapolate some parts of this study to demonstrate points in your paper or assignment. You can also read the article's own literature review to see what resources they used to establish their thoughts on the topics of stress and unfamiliar environments. Did they find literature you can look up and use too? Or did they also find very little, and then comment on this fact in their literature review?

Another avenue to pursue is to gather information about people who we know experience stress in environments we know are not familiar to them. This would include people/children experiencing painful medical treatments in a hospital, parents of neonates or chronically ill children who spend a great deal of time at the hospital or housing like the Ronald McDonald House, and youth in foster care.

Sometimes you make do with what you can find, while discussing the limitations of not having a lot of available information. And sometimes you need to change your project/paper topic. Just do the best you can!

References

Lewis, M. J., & Phillips, J. E. (2012). Older people’s cardiac responses as indicators of stress in familiar and unfamiliar environments. Psychophysiology, 49(4), 478–483.