The affective benefits of nature exposure: What's nature got to do with it?

Abstract

Nature interactions have been demonstrated to produce reliable affective benefits. While adults demonstrate strong preferences for natural environments over urban ones, it is not clear whether these affective benefits result from exposure to nature stimuli per se, or result from viewing a highly preferred stimulus. In one set of studies (Study 1 and 2), state affect before and after image viewing was examined as a function of both preference level (high, low, very high, or very low aesthetic value) and environment type (nature or urban). When aesthetic value was matched, no differences in affect change were found between environments. However, affect change was predicted by individual participants' ratings for the images. The largest affective benefits occurred after viewing very high aesthetic nature images, but Study 2 lacked an equivalently preferred urban image set. In a second set of studies (Study 3 and 4), new sets of very highly preferred images in categories other than nature scenes (urban scenes and animals) were employed. As before, individual differences in preference for the images (but not image category) was predictive of changes in affect. In Study 5, the nature and urban images from Study 1were rated on beauty to assess whether the stimuli's preference ratings were capturing anything other than simple aesthetics. Results showed that beauty/aesthetics and preference ('liking') were nearly identical. Lastly, a replication of Study 2 (Study 6) was conducted to test whether priming preference accounted for these benefits, but this was not the case. Together, these results suggest that nature improves affective state because it is such a highly preferred environment.

Can Residential Greenspace Exposure Improve Pain Experience? A Comparison between Physical Visit and Image Viewing

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Can positive and self-transcendent emotions promote pro-environmental behavior?

“…These connections include Emotions and Pro-Environmental Behavior 4 both physical experience in nature and its subjective appreciation. Empirically, healthy natural spaces are particularly likely to boost moods [2,3,4,5], and people who report strong personal connections with nature also tend to report higher well-being across a wide range of indicators spanning both hedonic and eudaimonic traditions [6,7,8]. Subjective nature relatedness strongly predicts pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors [9,10].…”

The affective and conversational benefits of a walk in nature among mother–daughter dyads

“…Research on the emotional benefits of nature is well documented (Bowler et al, 2010;McMahan & Estes, 2015), even across different types of natural settings including direct contact, being in the proximity of nearby nature, and looking at views/photographs of nature (e.g. Li et al 2018;Meidenbauer et al, 2020;Nisbet & Zelenski, 2011). In this study, we were particularly interested in examining the affective benefits of a walk in nature because this is one of the most common types of family-based nature activities parents and children engage in together (Izenstark & Ebata, 2019), and research has shown that direct contact with nature (either walking or sitting) was associated with the greatest improvement in psychological well-being (Brooks et al, 2017).…”