Time to get outside! As a new study from the University of Vermont (USA) has found that a walk in the park improves our mood as much as Christmas. The conclusions have been published in the journal People and Nature.
The experts analyzed thousands of Twitter messages posted by more than 4,600 people in 160 parks and lush areas (plazas and playgrounds) in San Francisco between May and August 2016. They were looking for posts with words that expressed joy or euphoria. Later, the messages were compared with the posts that the same users sent before and after their walk in the park.
The results of the study showed that, on average, individuals used happier words and expressed less negativity while visiting a park and for up to four hours later than those who did not. He also suggested that the greener and bigger the park was, the more happiness was shown in the tweets.
The researchers said the study is the first of its kind.
The team, led by Aaron Schwartz, analyzed the tweets using an online tool known as a hedonometer, which measures the happiness of large populations in real time by ranking more than 10,000 common English terms on a scale of one to nine.
According to the tool, “laughter” is the happiest word on the scale, with a score of 8.5, followed by “happiness” and “love.” The words “trapped”, “kill” and “jail” rank among the lowest.
Research showed that tweets sent from under a tree were 2.5% happier than average. Schwartz described the increase as “quite large.”
“The increase is equivalent to what Twitter generally experiences on Christmas Day,” explained the researcher.
Previous studies based on the hedometer, which collects and scores approximately 50 million tweets each day, found that Christmas was the happiest day of the year on Twitter.
The researchers say that the survey results could have important consequences for the future of life in the city.
“In cities, large green spaces are very important for people’s sense of well-being,” says Schwartz; which means that efforts to protect and expand urban natural areas extend far beyond luxury and second-tier concerns: “We see more and more evidence that it is critical to promoting mental health,” says Taylor Ricketts, co-author of the new study.
“Being in the wild offers restorative benefits in dimensions that are not available for purchase in a store or downloadable on a screen,” says Chris Danforth of the University of Vermont. He notes that a growing body of research shows an association between time in nature and improved mood, “but the specific causal links are difficult to pin down.”
How can urban nature improve mental health?
The green mind theory suggests that the brain’s negativity bias, “which may have been evolutionarily advantageous, is constantly triggered by the stressors of modern life ,” the team write.
“While we did not address causality in our study, we did find that negative language, such as ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘can’t’, decreased in the immediate aftermath of visits to urban parks “, says Danforth,” that offer specific linguistic markers of the mood enhancement available abroad. ” In contrast, the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns – “I” and “I” – declines dramatically in parks, perhaps indicating “a shift from the individual to the collective frame of mind,” the scientists write.
Of course, Twitter users are not a representative sample of all people, but they do represent a broad demographic with results not based on self-reports,
Philosophers have pondered the nature of happiness for centuries and psychologists have studied it for decades, but this new study suggests it could be as simple as this: In nature, people tend to be happier, a huge finding for cities of the future, especially considering that overall world population growth could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050. In fact, according to the United Nations, 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas in 2050.
Referencia: Editors: Kevin Gaston, Kai Chan, Robert Fish, Rosemary Hails and Cecily Maller Journal Overview: People and Nature is a broad-scope open access journal publishing work from across research areas exploring relationships between humans and nature. ISSN: 2575-8314
