Divjyot Kaur

Dr Kaur has been in the field of education for the past 20 years, teaching at various educational levels. She specialised in Child Development in India, which sparked her desire to pursue psychology studies when she moved to Singapore in 1997. Since completing her postgraduate education in psychology in 2009, Dr Kaur has pursued her academic career and has recently undertaken further postgraduate studies in clinical psychology. Dr Kaur’s doctorate research focused on ethnic differences in cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) to stress. She examined differences in CVR across Chinese, Malay, and Indian participants in Singapore and found that Indians showed highest CVR. This highlights the need to address psychosocial influences on health and understand the interplay between cultural factors and physical health. As part of other research in this area she has also conducted an intervention study with patients recovering from Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG) surgery at the National Heart Centre, Singapore General Hospital, with improvements in psychosocial (depression, perceived stress), and physiological characteristics (SBP and HR reactivity) among patients who attended the six-week psychosocial skills training. Dr Kaur has previously worked closely with children with developmental disorders in Special Education school settings. She has contributed towards serving these children through her clinical work at a local hospital for over 12 years as a locum psychologist. She is examining caregiver stress among parents of children with developmental disorders as well as aspects that lead to the breakdown of the caregiving process as individuals with developmental disorders transition to adulthood. Dr Kaur draws on the definition of mental well-being itself as an additional driver of her research. This construct has been elaborated upon extensively in literature, but there are often overlaps in these definitions and the measures used for examining mental well-being. Her current research interests involve various stress-related topics such as differentiated responses to stress and emotion across cultures, acculturation and its relation to physical health conditions, job stress and its implications in globally diverse organisations, and psychosocial interventions for stress and anger management. Caregiver stress is an often overlooked area as the focus of research tends to be on individuals with mental illness.