Simulated nature walks improve psychological well-being along a natural to urban continuum

Abstract

Compared to urban environments, interactions with natural environments have been associated with several health benefits including psychological restoration and improved emotional well-being. However, classifying environments dichotomously as either natural or urban may emphasize between-category differences and minimize potentially important within-category variation (e.g., forests versus fields of crops; neighborhoods versus city centers). Therefore, the current experiment assessed how viewing brief videos of different environments, ranging along a continuum from stereotypically natural to stereotypically urban, influenced subjective ratings of mood, restoration, and well-being. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four video conditions, which depicted a simulated walk through a pine forest, a farmed field, a tree-lined urban neighborhood, or a bustling city center essentially devoid of greenery. Immediately before and after the videos, participants rated their current emotional states. Participants additionally rated the perceived restorativeness of the video. The results supported the idea that the virtual walks differentially influenced affect and perceived restoration, even when belonging to the same nominal category of natural or urban. The pine forest walk significantly improved happiness relative to both urban walks, whereas the farmed field walk did not. The bustling city center walk decreased feelings of calmness compared to all other walks, including the tree-lined neighborhood walk. The walks also differed on two perceived restorativeness measures (daydreaming and being away) in a graded fashion; however, the farmed field walk was found to be less fascinating than all other walks, including both urban walks. Taken together, these results suggest that categorizing environments as “natural versus urban” may gloss over meaningful within-category variability regarding the restorative potential of different physical environments.

Effects of immersion in a simulated natural environment on stress reduction and emotional arousal: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…A simulated natural environment was broadly defined as an audio-visual projection of an existing or fictional setting dominated by vegetation and/or other abiotic natural features (Browning M. E. H. M. et al, 2020), excluding animals. It should be noted that the simple nature-build dichotomy is increasingly being questioned due to the difficulty of providing urban planning guidance and exaggerating the differences between environments (Van den Berg et al, 2014;Brancato et al, 2022). Here, we classify urban scenes dominated by natural elements as natural environments as well, aiming to revise and deepen our understanding of the essence of restorative environments.…”

“…The sample sizes ranged from 20 (Chan et al, 2021b) to 269 (Bornioli et al, 2018), with a median of 69. Studies with larger sample sizes (n ≥ 200) were mainly conducted via online platforms (Bornioli et al, 2018;Brancato et al, 2022). More than half of the studies had subjects exclusively from universities or research institutions.…”

“…Among these, 15 studies used non-surround projection devices. None of the studies employing online surveys declared the use of audio-visual materials adapted to Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) or HMD (Bornioli et al, 2018;Zabini et al, 2020;Brancato et al, 2022). Of the remaining 10 studies, HMDs were the most frequently utilized surround projection devices (n = 9), with CAVE being used in only one study (Annerstedt et al, 2013).…”

“…Visually, forests were the most frequently used simulated nature type (n = 14), followed by parks (n = 6). Four studies set up multiple simulated natural environments (Van den Berg et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2016;Brancato et al, 2022). Some studies used the broad term "natural environment" or "natural landscape" without emphasizing specific types (Schutte et al, 2017;McMahan et al, 2018;Snell et al, 2018;Newman et al, 2022).…”

“…Some studies used the broad term "natural environment" or "natural landscape" without emphasizing specific types (Schutte et al, 2017;McMahan et al, 2018;Snell et al, 2018;Newman et al, 2022). Subjects in two studies viewed urban scenes dominated by natural elements, including vertical greenery attached to the exterior of a building (Chan et al, 2021a) and the tree-lined neighborhood (Brancato et al, 2022). Comparator descriptions varied and covered commercial areas (Kinnafick and Thøgersen-Ntoumani, 2014;Bornioli et al, 2018;Jo et al, 2022), downtown areas (Zabini et al, 2020;Chan et al, 2021a), urban streets and roadways (van den Berg et al, 2003Berg et al, , 2014Pilotti et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2016;Schutte et al, 2017;Jiang et al, 2021).…”