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The influence of indirect nature experience on human system

Forest Science and Technology

ISSN: 2158-0103 (Print) 2158-0715 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tfst20

The influence of indirect nature experience on

human system

Jin Young Jeon, Poung Sik Yeon & Won Sop Shin

To cite this article: Jin Young Jeon, Poung Sik Yeon & Won Sop Shin (2018) The influence of

indirect nature experience on human system, Forest Science and Technology, 14:1, 29-32, DOI:

10.1080/21580103.2017.1420701

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21580103.2017.1420701

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FOREST SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 2018

E–ISSN 2158-0715, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 29–32

https://doi.org/10.1080/21580103.2017.1420701

The inﬂuence of indirect nature experience on human system

Jin Young Jeona, Poung Sik Yeonb and Won Sop Shina

aGraduate Department of Forest Therapy, Chungbuk National University, 1 Chungdae-ro, Cheongju 28644, Korea; bNational Center for Forest

Therapy, 209 Therapy-ro, Bonghyun-myeon, Yeongju, Kyungbuk 36043, Korea

ABSTRACT

A growing number of studies have shown that contact with nature contributes enhancing positive

psycho-physiological effects. This study experimentally compared the effects of direct and indirect

contact with nature on psychological and physiological affect, respectively. Thirty university students

participated in this experiment. The results of this study indicated that indirect nature experience also

provided positive psychological and physiological effects, except for parasympathetic nerve activity.

The results of the present study would support the effectiveness of virtual nature for people who

cannot easily access real nature in order to improve psychological beneﬁts.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 20 November 2017

Accepted 20 December 2017

KEYWORDS

Contact with nature; psycho-

physiological effects; virtual

nature; forest therapy; health

beneﬁts

1. Introduction

According to biophilia (Wilson 1984) and human evolution-

ary (Ulrich 1981) theories, humans have spent many

thousands of years adapting to the natural environment, yet

have only inhabited urban ones for relatively few generations

(Maller et al. 2006). However, the world has become an urban

society, with a vast number of people becoming alienated

from the traditional people–nature relationship. The modern

urban continuous, distracting stimuli can impede people’s

abilities to focus on signiﬁcant issues or to achieve relaxed

states (Kaplan 2001; Kim et al. 2017). Viewing nature is con-

sidered one approach to promoting balance and harmony in

the modern urbanite’s life.

Ulrich et al. (1991) argued that a person’s initial response

to an environment is affective. They believed that the initial

affective response to an environment shapes the cognitive

events that follow, leading to sustained attention, higher lev-

els of positive feelings, and reduced negative or stress-related

feelings (Valtchanov et al. 2010). The growing number of

studies supported Ulrich and his colleagues’ argument

and evidenced that viewing natural scenes contributes to

reducing stress, provides more positive psycho-physiological

effects on human systems, and may facilitate recovery from

illness (Shin et al. 2012; Bang et al. 2017; Lee 2017). Cross-

cultural studies also indicate that visual exposure to natural

scenes improves moods, reduces stress, and provides opti-

mal physiological activation (Han 2010; Shin et al. 2011;

Honold et al. 2014; Song et al. 2015; Bang et al. 2017; Lee

2017).

The accumulating evidence of the beneﬁcial effects of

viewing nature prompts an important question: can restor-

ative environments be created and customized to promote a

health beneﬁt and help people who have difﬁculties visiting

or spending time in real nature? In the modern society, not

everyone can access nature easily. In particular, people with

disabilities, senior citizens, and those with other illnesses can-

not freely seek out natural settings. For these populations,

replicating the restorative effects of nature may be achievable

using indirect nature experiences.

This study experimentally compared the effects of direct

and indirect contact with nature (i.e., virtual nature experi-

ence) on psychological and physiological affect, respectively.

To our knowledge, this comparison of direct and indirect

nature experience and their differential impacts on psycho-

physiological affect, respectively, has not been investigated

experimentally.

2. Material and methods

2.1. Participants

Thirty university students aged between 18 and 27 (21.2 §1.7)

years, participated in this experiment. Anyone with

a current or recent history of endocrine, neuropsychiatric,

salivary gland or acute/chronic pain disorders, or who was

using certain disqualifying medicines, was excluded from

participating. Before the experiment, the participants were

fully informed about the aims and procedures involved.

After brieﬁng about the experiment, the participants signed

an agreement to take part in the study. The study was

approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Chung-

buk National University (CBNU 201609-BMSB-366-01)

and conducted in accordance with committee’s regulations.

Participants came to the laboratory one at a time by sched-

uled appointments over the course of 8 weeks.

2.2. Experimental design

To compare the effects of direct and indirect nature experi-

ence on psychological and physiological inﬂuence, two sets of

experiments were conducted. A nature setting located near

the Chungbuk National University campus in Cheongju,

South Korea was selected for the effect of direct nature expe-

rience. The nature area was ﬂat, bright and well-managed

with mostly pine trees (Figure 1). Physiological and psycho-

logical effects of indirect nature experiences were measured

in a laboratory with an artiﬁcial climate maintained at 25C

with 50% relative humidity (Figure 2).

CONTACT Won Sop Shin shinwon@chungbuk.ac.kr

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, dis-

tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

J. Y. JEON ET AL.

E-ISSN 2158-0715

Figure 3. Mood improvement after direct nature experience.

2.5. Proﬁle of mood state (POMS)

Figure 1. Study area for investigating the effect of direct forest experience.

2.3. Heart rate variability

Heart rate variability (HRV) was measured as the periods

between consecutive R waves (R–R intervals) in an electro-

cardiogram recorded with a portable electrocardiograph

(Canopy 9 plus, IEMBIO). The low frequency (LF; 0.04–

0.15 Hz) band and the high frequency (HF; 0.15–0.40 Hz)

band were measured. The HF power was suggested as reﬂect

parasympathetic nervous activity (Kobayashi et al. 2012).

2.4. Semantic differential method

The participant’s emotional impact was investigated using a

modiﬁed semantic differential (SD) method (Osgood et al.

1957). This SD method contains items and each item has a

pair of adjectives, such as “comfortable–uncomfortable.”

The POMS is a commonly employed, factor-based and ana-

lytically derived scale to measure psychological distress. In

this study, the Korean version of POMS was employed to

measure each participant’s six mood states, such as tension

and anxiety (TA), depression (D), anger and hostility (A-H),

vigor (V), fatigue (F), and confusion (C).

3. Results

3.1. Direct and indirect nature experience and mood

state

To investigate the effect of mood states from direct and indi-

rect nature experiences, participants’ mood states were mea-

sured before and after exposure to nature experiences. As can

be seen from Figures 3 and 4, there were signiﬁcant differen-

ces in t-scores in both direct and indirect nature experience

groups. Speciﬁcally, in the direct nature experience group,

participants’ tension and anxiety (TA) (t = 4.65; p = .000),

depression (D) (t = 2.86; p = .008), fatigue (F) (t = 3.70;

p = .001), and confusion (C) (t = 4.64; p = .000) were signiﬁ-

cantly improved at p 0.01 level after exposure to nature.

On the other hand, anger (A) (t = 2.10; p = .044) and vigor

(V) (t = 2.18; p = .038) were improved at p 0.05 level after

exposure to nature. Interestingly, in the indirect nature expe-

rience group, all moods signiﬁcantly improved at p 0.01

level after exposure to virtual nature [tension and anxiety

Figure 2. Laboratory for investigating the effect of indirect forest experience. Figure 4. Mood improvement after indirect nature experience.

E-ISSN 2158-0715

FOREST SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

4. Discussion

Figure 5. Differences in SD scores between direct and indirect nature

experiences.

(TA) (t = 4.17; p = .000), depression (D) (t = 3.81; p = .001),

anger and hostility (A) (t = 3.74; p = .001), vigor (V)

(t = 2.85; p = .008), fatigue (F) (t = 4.12; p = .000), and confu-

sion (C) (t = 3.16; p = .004)]. The results indicate that those

who had nature experiences either directly or indirectly

obtained positive mood states.

3.2. Semantic differential (SD) method

Figure 5 compares the effects of emotional impact between

direct and indirect nature experiences. Among the three

emotional impact categories, there were signiﬁcant differen-

ces in “pleasant” (t = 2.39; p = .020) and “natural” (t = 2.60;

p = .012). However, in the “calm” category, no signiﬁcant dif-

ference was found (t = –.111; p = .912). The results of the SD

comparison indicate that participants who had a direct

nature experience felt higher pleasant and natural feelings

than those who had an indirect nature experience.

3.3. Parasympathetic nerve activity

The results of analysis to compare the natural logarithm of

HF component, which is known as an estimate of parasym-

pathetic nerve activity, between direct and indirect nature

experiences are shown in Figures 6. As can be seen from

Figure 6, there were signiﬁcant differences in mean HF values

between before and after in the direct nature experience

group (t = 3.57; p = .001). However, in the indirect nature

experience group, no signiﬁcant difference was found

between before and after experiences (t = 0.97; p = .336).

Contact with nature has been evidenced to enhance psy-

cho-physiological effect positively (Shin et al. 2012; Beil

and Hanes 2013; Bang et al. 2017; Lee 2017). The present

study was performed to compare the psycho-physiological

effects of direct and indirect nature experience. Although

some previous studies (Ulrich 1984; Valtchanov et al.

2010; McAllister et al. 2017) have reported positive

impacts of indirect nature experiences, very few studies

have reported the impacts of comparison between direct

and indirect nature experiences.

The results of this study indicate that indirect nature expe-

rience provided positive psychological and physiological

effects as direct nature experience did, except parasympa-

thetic nerve activity. The ﬁndings in this study are consistent

with the Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) Attention Restoration

Theory (ART) that nature provides human restoration. The

ﬁndings also are in line with Ulrich’s argument that contact

with nature provides positive physiological responses.

The present study results indicated that exposure to

virtual nature can produce signiﬁcant improvement in affec-

tive states. Modern technology in virtual reality (VR) would

allow for the complete customization and creation of restor-

ative environments (Valtchanov et al. 2010). The results of

the present study would support the effectiveness of virtual

nature for people who cannot easily access real nature. People

with disabilities, patients, inmates, and workers in remote

areas are in urgent need of experiencing nature to obtain pos-

itive psycho-physiological beneﬁts. The present study can

provide strong justiﬁcation for providing virtual nature.

The ﬁndings of the present study indicate that even

brief, virtual nature experience can enhance affect, and

emphasizes the necessity of indirect nature experience for

special populations who cannot easily access real nature.

The experimental constructs employed in this study may

have some limitations that can be addressed by future

research. Relatively small sample size and a homogeneous

group in this study may limit its statistical power. Further

research should consider including more participants from

diverse populations. Especially, studies with large numbers

of participants from different population groups may gen-

eralize the results of this study. Although the physiological

measure did not show a signiﬁcant difference in HRV

response between before and after exposure to indirect

nature, the measures on psychological effects suggest that

a large variety of content needs to be made available in

order to achieve compatibility with a large number of peo-

ple. Duration of exposure to indirect nature and content

of nature may cause the insigniﬁcant difference in HRV.

Further research with different content of nature, different

duration to exposure and different population may be

needed to conﬁrm the ﬁndings of this study.

Figure 6. HF changes after nature experiences.

5. Conclusion

This study investigated the psycho-physiological effects of

direct and indirect nature experiences. The results of this

study showed that exposure to real and virtual natural envi-

ronment appears to be beneﬁcial to participants’ moods and

feelings. However, exposure to the real natural environment

tends to be more beneﬁcial in physiological response (para-

sympathetic nerve activity) than exposure to virtual nature.

J. Y. JEON ET AL.

E-ISSN 2158-0715

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

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