Can Urban Forest Settings Evoke Positive Emotion? Evidence on Facial Expressions and Detection of Driving Factors

Abstract

There is increasing interest in experiences of urban forests because relevant studies have revealed that forest settings can promote mental well-being. The mental response to a forest experience can be evaluated by facial expressions, but relevant knowledge is limited at large geographical scales. In this study, a dataset of 2824 photos, detailing the evaluated age (toddler, youth, middle-age, and senior citizen) and gender of urban forest visitors, was collected from Sina Weibo (a social media application similar to Twitter in China) between 1–7 October 2018, in 12 randomly chosen cities in China. Happy and sad expressions were rated as scores by FireFACE software V1.0, and the positive response index (PRI) was calculated by subtracting sad scores from happy scores. Regional environmental factors were collected to detect driving forces using regression analyses. Happy scores were higher in forests than in urban settings, while sad scores for toddlers were lower in forests than in promenades and squares. Females showed more positive emotional expressions than males. Increases in happy scores were driven by the increase of daily minimum temperature; while PRI declined with increases in latitude. Overall, an urban forest experience can evoke positive emotions, which is likely due to comfortable feelings in warm temperatures.

Optimizing Urban Forest Landscape for Better Perceptions of Positive Emotions

“…Their intended facial expressions were sourced from posts on Sina Weibo, a micro-blog platform similar to Twitter, to assess emotional responses. Using photos as sources of facial expressions for evaluating emotional responses to urban forest experiences have been carried out several times [27,34,35,37]. We acknowledge that intended facial expressions do not fully represent spontaneous emotions in response to experiences in an urban forest park.…”

“…Instead, facial expressions are a more direct presentation of perceived emotion by a green space user who experienced environmental variation [32]. New frontiers of forest landscape have been established by employing facial expressions as a new metric to assess emotional responses to different green spaces at local [28,29,32,33], regional [27,34], and national scales [35]. These together suggest a potential to continue using facial expression scores as a meter to gauge emotional responses to varied landscape structures.…”

The Relationship between Landscape Metrics and Facial Expressions in 18 Urban Forest Parks of Northern China

“…We used the microblogging site Sina Weibo (Sina Corporation, Beijing, China) as the photo data source since the information was completely accessible to the public and the photos contained geolocation data [50]. Weibo is the largest social network service (SNS) platform in China, publishing the largest number of microblogs by Chinese users [51]. The study focused on visitors with typical oriental facial features, collecting 2031 photos to test the facial emotional expression of those visitors from 1 January to 31 December 2020, from 18 different urban forest parks.…”

“…We used the microblogging site Sina Weibo (Sina Corporation, Beijing, China) as the photo data source since the information was completely accessible to the public and the photos contained geolocation data [50]. Weibo is the largest social network service (SNS) platform in China, publishing the largest number of microblogs by Chinese users [51].…”

“…Fourth, our age categorizations were guesses based primarily on people's appearances. Liu et al's study [51] used visual assessments with the same age ranges: toddlers 0-5, youths 15-25, adults 30-60, and old people 60+; people who seemed to fall into the gaps were added to the nearest age group (e.g., someone seven years old would be classified with the toddlers). We might have misclassified the facial expressions because of the person's age or the fluidity of expression; for example, a snapshot of what we classified as a toddler's neutral expression might have been a transitional expression between happy and sad.…”