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With Happiness and Health for All

COE IMPACT REPORT 2018-2019

With Happiness and Health for All


This academic year began with the Common Experience program asking Texas State faculty, staff and students to engage with the theme of Innovation; to explore new ideas and embrace unique methods that would help to shape our future. Across campus, Bobcats were coming together to brainstorm, collaborate and problem solve. For Dr. Andrea Dennison, this year of innovation made the perfect setting for the extraordinary new pathways she explored as she worked to move her multidisciplinary Happy+Healthy Toolkit from a prototype to a ready-for-market product.

Dennison, an assistant professor of School Psychology, began her journey with the Happy+Healthy Toolkit in 2017 at Texas State’s annual CoSearch competition. CoSearch is a two-day intensive incubator for Texas State faculty to engage in interdisciplinary, collaborative research projects. Dr. Rebecca Davio, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, attended CoSearch with the idea of creating an accessible tool for adults to reduce their stress by integrating wellness and well-being information from previously disparate disciplines.

As a school psychologist, Dennison was drawn to this project’s potential application and benefits for youth, especially those living in or near poverty. “If we want to shape people’s lives in a meaningful way,” she says, “the best way to do that is to aim knowledge and skills development at children, who stand to benefit the most from learning these types of skills.” While stress has universal adverse effects on the body and the lifespan, Dennison notes, high-poverty environments come with additional stressors that people of higher socioeconomic status do not have to consider. With this in mind, Dennison signed herself up for Davio’s team and over the next two days, they developed the initial concept for the Happy+Healthy Toolkit.

Shortly thereafter, they received a Michael and Susan Dell Community Collaborative for Child Health mini-grant that they used to create a beta version of the Happy+Healthy Toolkit, a set of 21 cards, grounded in multidisciplinary research, each featuring an activity that promotes whole-person wellness and social-emotional learning. The Toolkit includes coping mechanisms based in neuroscience, mindfulness, positive psychology, nutrition, prevention science and other wellness fields.

As a school psychologist, Dennison was drawn to this project’s potential application and benefits for youth, especially those living in or near poverty. “If we want to shape people’s lives in a meaningful way,” she says, “the best way to do that is to aim knowledge and skills development at children, who stand to benefit the most from learning these types of skills.” While stress has universal adverse effects on the body and the lifespan, Dennison notes, high-poverty environments come with additional stressors that people of higher socioeconomic status do not have to consider. With this in mind, Dennison signed herself up for Davio’s team and over the next two days, they developed the initial concept for the Happy+Healthy Toolkit.

Dr. Andrea Dennison

The braille iteration of the Toolkit is just one of the many innovative steps that Dennison and Davio have taken this year to share their tool with as wide an audience as possible. This spring, the team was one of 11 projects selected to showcase their research at Texas State’s Innovation Lab at South by Southwest, where they were able to network with donors, alumni and community members and establish connections between public research and private interests. The team also attended Texas State’s inaugural New Ventures Pitch Competition, which resulted in their participation in the university’s National Science Foundation-funded I-Corps for Entrepreneurs program for developing business ideas in the STEM fields. The project took perhaps its most innovative step this year as Dennison and Davio negotiated the first university professor copyright licensing agreement with Texas State, allowing them to sell the Toolkit online at happyhealthytoolkit.com.

Dennison has been especially grateful for the many platforms the university has given to her and her team, especially the four Texas State graduate students who have helped her build the Social-Emotional Well-being Lab, a virtual lab that meets in-person monthly during the fall and spring. Her students participate in several research projects, but have been fundamental in the Happy+Healthy Toolkit’s pilot testing. They are currently working on analyzing and publishing data from the Toolkit’s multinational pilot study, which included youth and adult participants from Texas, Mexico and Spain. In this pilot research, teachers and other practitioners, such as counselors and psychologists working in clinical settings, were asked to implement the Toolkit with their students and/or clients. For Dennison, this project provides her with “the opportunity to engage graduate students in professional writing opportunities and research practices,” as well as the mutually beneficial process of sharing the Toolkit’s public health message with community members.

As the team’s research continues, Dennison emphasizes the importance of a mixed-methods approach, remarking that she and Davio are actively looking to their participants to help them shape the next round of their studies. So far, she says, the responses to the Toolkit have been overwhelmingly positive. Moving forward, the pair would love to establish partnerships with school districts locally, nationally and internationally in order to continue sharing the Toolkit with all those who need it. “Our country is suffering from an epidemic of stress right now,” Dennison says, adding, “There are so many different ways of coping with stressors.” She hopes that by bringing together various bodies of research in an accessible way, all those who are managing stress will find new ways to stay happy and healthy. •