Restorative Environments

Greetings Earthlings! Today we're talking about restorative environments. These are environments that promote our health and well-being.

And we've talked a lot about health in environmental psychology, focusing on the role of the environment in our health. But we focused more on the negative--what are called "pathogenic factors," the environmental factors that harm health. Here we're taking a more positive approach. We're focusing more on what are called "salutogenic effects." We're taking more of a "salutogenesis approach," rather than a "pathogenesis approach."

I think you'll agree that the natural environment can promote our health and well-being. But so can a well-designed built environment.

Now what are we talking about when we're talking about "restorative environments"? And the simple answer here is that restorative environments are environments that foster recovery from psychological or physical illness, and also foster recovery from ambient and other stressors. Restorative environments contribute to well-being, and they also promote resilience, making us stronger, and that helps prevent illness.

Is nature a restorative environment? Does it have salutogenic effects? There's certainly a long history of people's belief in the power of nature to heal, both past and present. The authors of Chapter Seven of your textbook say that going into nature is one of the most widely practiced ways of reducing stress and fatigue.

In a 2008 article, environmental psychologists Berman, Jones, and Kaplan asked readers to "imagine a therapy that has no side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost." The therapy they had in mind was nature.

But is nature restorative? Self-report sure suggests so. For example, surveys from many countries find that people like to visit nature because it helps them relax and release tension. People say they're more restored by nature than other environments, and they claim their favorite outdoor places are more restorative than their favorite indoor places. Residents with more "green space," that is, with nature areas near or around their homes, report better physical and mental health even after statistically controlling for socioeconomic background.

But in addition to these subjective reports, environmental psychology research provides evidence that's not based entirely on self-report. Laboratory and field studies, and archival research--that's using research from files--support the hypothesis that nature has restorative effects, and benefits our affect, our cognition, and our stress recovery. In other words, our moods, our attention and memory, improved feelings of well-being and improvements in physiological measures of stress, like our blood pressure, our pulse, and our cortisol levels. These studies find that visual experiences of nature can counteract stress and facilitate our recovery from mental fatigue. Research also finds positive effects on cognition and positive effects on moods.

So, for example, Taylor and Kuo in 2009 found that children with attention deficit disorder concentrated better after a walk in the park. Another study found that contact with greenery in the school setting boosts children's cognitive performance. Contact with greenery and work environments enhances workers' mood and productivity. People even appear to benefit from simulated nature.

For example, in one experiment, stressed people who viewed slides for 30 minutes of a forest experience showed evidence of stress reduction. But stressed people who experienced the forest directly for 30 minutes experienced many more positive effects, including feeling more energy and altered states of consciousness.

In 1984, in one of the first studies on nature and health, Robert Ulrich used hospital records to compare people recovering from gallbladder surgery in rooms overlooking a green space, with similar patients who recovered in rooms with a view of a brick wall. Patients that recovered with a view of nature had shorter hospital stays and needed fewer painkillers. More recently, in a study in a Korean hospital, Park randomly assigned patients recovering from surgery to either a room with potted plants, or without potted plants. The patients in rooms with potted plants recovered more quickly and needed fewer pain meds. Studies also find that nature-based recreation, like hiking, that does not include substantial technological mediation or alteration of the environment, is positively correlated with psychological well-being. There's also a decent amount of research showing that exposure to nature is good for mental health, and leads to increased happiness.

So the bottom line: There's decent evidence that exposure to nature, green spaces, and greenery, have salutogenic effects.

Now this brings us to our next question. If nature benefits our health because it helps restore us and because it promotes resilience, what is the mechanism here? In other words, why is nature restorative? And there are two main theories here that explain why nature is salutogenic. And the first one goes by the name of "AttentionRestoration Theory," and it was introduced by two environmental psychologists, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in a 1989 book called "The Experience of Nature." And the Kaplans, by the way, are also known in environmental psychology for creating a framework to explain people's landscape preferences.

Now attention restoration theory, or ART as we call it for short, suggests that modern life requires a lot of "directed attention," and directed attention is the effortful process of paying attention and focusing while simultaneously blocking out irrelevant stimuli which are often more interesting than the ones that you need to focus on your everyday and work tasks. And sometimes this goes by the name of "voluntary attention," so "directed attention" and voluntary attention are the same thing.

Now I think you can easily relate to this when you think about your academic work and how hard it can be to focus on that when you're trying to ignore the siren sound of social media or streaming entertainment or the people that you live with. And likewise, some of you have undoubtedly had to use directed attention to screen out the activities going on in your home while you were engaged in online learning tests, right? Obviously.

The "central executive" is the cognitive mechanism that manages directed attention. And in psychology the executive functions of the brain are responsible for higher order cognitive functions including focused attention and decision making. And this includes what's called "working memory," which holds and replays visual and auditory stimuli and processes it for the task at hand. But high demands for directed attention can wear on us cognitively. We can even develop what is called "directed attentional fatigue" or DAF for short. And DAF is basically mental fatigue, and its symptoms include trouble concentrating, as Ohlny and her team explain in a 2016 review of the research on ART, attentional fatigue is important because it's associated with poor decision making and lower levels of self-control which are linked to a variety of health-related issues. To put it another way, DAF makes it harder for people to resist the temptations that aren't good for their health.

Now more than half of the world's population lives in urban environments, and ART theorists say that these people are particularly at risk for DAF. According to the Kaplans, some environments can counter DAF---they can help our central executive recover and replenish by relaxing the demands on directed attention, thereby reducing mental fatigue and improving our concentration. According to ART, looking at or being in nature--what Rachel Kaplan called a "green experience"--is restorative because it compels our involuntary attention. We don't have to work hard to process nature. It's both fascinating and effortless at the same time--it requires bottom-up attention rather than the top-down attention of directed thinking. And this is what the Kaplans call the environmental quality of "soft fascination." It stands in contrast to the hard fascination of directed attention, and it's conducive to self-reflection. The Kaplans invite us to consider as examples of soft fascination clouds, sunsets, a campfire, and the like.

Now ART also says that in addition to soft fascination, restorative environments give us a sense of what they call "being away." So "being away" is another restorative environmental quality. And what this means is that the environment has qualities that give us a feeling of getting a break from our everyday life, our everyday hassles and obligations. Qualities that provide us an escape from everyday activities are restorative; they have the qualities of "being away."

Now "extent" is a third quality of restorative environments according to the Kaplans. Richard Kaplan describes it as the environment is "rich and coherent enough to constitute another world," it has sufficient scope to engage the mind and take up the space in our head that is normally occupied by everyday concerns. Another quality contributing to an environment being restorative is that the particular environment be a good fit for the person, in particular that it offers them the opportunity to do the things they like, or have experiences that they like, and this a restorative environmental quality is called "compatibility."

Now note that nature is often more restorative than built environments because not only does it offer more "soft fascination." It's also more likely to give us a sense of "being away" than built environments. Likewise, natural environments are more likely to have the qualities of "extent." However, Kaplan and Kaplan note that some built environments do have these restorative elements; in particular, I mentioned certain churches.

Now let's talk a little bit about the research on ART. Most of the tests of the attention restoration theory hypotheses are laboratory experiments, and what the experimenters do is typically induce fatigue with some kind of a task, and then they manipulate the IV, which is the type of setting--natural or urban. So some of the fatigued participants are randomly assigned to immersion in a natural setting while others are randomly assigned to immersion in an urban environment. These studies generally find that the fatigued people that were immersed in a forest or a park score better on a cognitive task requiring attention than the ones that were sent to the urban setting. And note here that the cognitive task is the dependent measure.

Now I find ART appealing and plausible, maybe because my subjective experience is that nature fosters the restoration of my cognitive function. It's definitely one of my go-to's. I do a lot of intense thinking and concentrating in my work, and I often turn to nature for recovery. But I'd like to see more field research that examines whether real-world cognitive fatigue is reduced by visits to nature.

Let's talk next about stress recovery theory, or SRT, as it's known. This is the second major explanation for why natural environments are restorative. While ART assumes that environments are restorative because they replenish us cognitively and help us recover our directed attention abilities, SRT is different. It is more of an affective or feelings explanation. SRT, I should mention, originates with Roger Ulrich in 1983.

Now SRT is an evolutionary theory in that it suggests that we naturally respond to natural settings because of our species' long evolutionary past in nature. It assumes that because humans evolved in natural rather than built environments that we have an affinity for them and naturally, without thinking, we feel positively when exposed to non-threatening natural environments, and by non-threatening, I mean ones that don't obviously threaten our survival or have many stressors. You know, like an erupting volcano is a natural environment but clearly might not be so restorative, right?

As Mayer and Franz put it, "for much of human history, the argument goes, nature was our source of food, safety, and shelter, so we became wired to value it because it supported our survival. Humans have lived the vast majority of their lives embedded in nature, belonging to the natural world in very real ways. In geological time, it is only a tick of the clock that we we have spent in highly urban settings, working in concrete buildings, driving in climate-controlled cars, and living in relatively densely populated areas shut off from nature." In other words, it was adaptive for us to develop a strong preference and natural positive feelings towards certain kinds of natural environments because that would motivate us to seek out and stay in those environments, those environments that provided sources of food, water, shelter, and refuge.

Some SRT theorists say that unthreatening natural content makes us feel good because in some ways it's where we belong, it's a return to our roots, and the positive feelings it instinctually evokes are what makes it restorative. The positive feelings that nature evokes soothe us psychologically and physiologically. SRT suggests that specific environmental features associated with survival called "preferenda" are especially likely to elicit automatic positive feelings. For example, research finds that people prefer vegetation, trees, running water, open meadows surrounded by trees, natural spaces that offer protection, and forests without dense underbrush.

Although intuitively appealing, SRT theory is difficult to prove and easy to poke holes in. For instance, if preferences for nature are so strong, then why do so many people prefer urban environments? Why do so many people choose to recreate in gyms rather than outside or choose passive indoor recovery leisure activities, like watching Netflix, over being outside? Why do some people not appreciate nature at all? Why is it that nature with threatening elements can sometimes be restorative? Why is it visiting a desert like Joshua Tree or Death Valley still restorative even though it does not possess the elements that would have contributed to survival?

For the last 30 or so years SRT and ART were the favorite explanations for nature's restorative effects. But there are some new kids in town. The "Perceptual Fluency Account" is one of them, or PFA, for short. It integrates ideas both from ART and SRT, and it suggests that natural environments are restorative because they're more easily processed than built environments. "Perceptual fluency" then is about the ease and the efficiency of perceptual processing. In this case, the greater perceptual fluency processing of the natural environment is believed to stem from our evolutionary heritage. More specifically, the visual brain developed when humans lived in natural rather than built environments, and so it's better suited for the processing of natural environments. The greater perceptual fluency of natural environments is attributed to the greater coherence of them. "Coherence" has to do with the extent to which a scene is organized into a unified whole. Natural environments tend to be more coherent than built environments, and that's what contributes to perceptual fluency.

Another interesting part of PFA has to do with what are called "fractal patterns," also known as "self-similar patterns." As Belgian environmental psychologist Joye and Vandenberg explained, nature possesses many fractal characteristics. These fractals are shapes and scenes consisting of increasingly smaller copies of themselves over a large number of scales and magnitude. For example, in a tree all of the branches are different shaped versions of the same thing. This perceptual predictability and redundancy, or self-similarity, makes natural scenes easier to group and process than urban ones. Experimental studies so far support the idea that fractals in nature promote a wakeful relaxed state.

We've spoken often about the interplay between the individual and the environment and how individual differences affect the person-environment relationship. And in the case of nature as restorative, the question is whether there are individual differences that affect the nature of human-restoration relationship. Research seems to indicate that the individual characteristic known as "connectedness to nature" is the strongest individual factor tied to getting psychological benefits from nature. Mayer and Franz define connectedness to nature as an individual's trait levels of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world. Connectedness to nature and similar concepts like identification with nature are about a person's sense of oneness with the natural world, their sense of kinship with animals and plants, and their sense of equality between themselves and nature. Connectedness to nature can also be a spiritual experience when it fosters a sense of wonder and awe about the immensity of nature and the cosmos.

Researchers have studied the factors which seem to determine connectedness to nature, and they found a number of different influences. One of those is childhood experiences. They are one influence on connectedness to nature. People who are higher in nature connectedness report spending more time in nature during their childhood compared to people who aren't as connected to nature. I, for example, am high on nature connectedness, and that applies to me; I spent a lot of my childhood playing in the woods.

Now culture also makes a difference, and connectedness to nature is an important part of some spiritual and cultural traditions. For example, Native Americans are more likely to view humans as a part of nature and to feel psychologically close to nature compared to Euro Americans. But I should point out that the "biophilia hypothesis" suggests that all people have an innate connection to the natural world, and that's why it's so important for human health. In fact, eco-psychologists like Deborah DuNann Winter argue that the repression of this connection in modern life is harmful to our health and the sustainability of our planet. Urban living, technology, building design, and modern lifestyles, all interrupt this connection.

Nature connectedness is also important because it's a predictor of environmental concern and action, but ironically this is a case where nature connectedness may reduce happiness. People that strongly identify with nature experience emotional pain when nature and wildlife are harmed. Individuals who incorporate nature into their sense of self may experience harm done to nature as harm done to themselves. As climate change and human settlements and activities ravage natural environments and wildlife, people who are high in nature connectedness may find themselves sad and disturbed. They may even be more likely to experience eco-anxiety, a chronic fear of ecological and environmental disaster.

Finally, I want to point out that both ART and SRT suggest that natural environments are superior to built environments from the standpoint of restorative environmental qualities. But the original ART theorists, the Kaplans, did in fact acknowledge that these qualities can be present in some built environments. Biophilic design is about designing built environments that provide contact with nature, so I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that.

First, in some ways this is an old idea; I mean you can see many examples throughout history of biophilic design. Now remember that the biophilia hypothesis suggests that all people have an innate connection to the natural world, and this is why it's so important for human health. But the proponents of biophilic design also ground their ideas in ART and SRT. "The Practice of Biophilic Design" by Stephen Kellert and Elizabeth Calabresi is a common reference for biophilic design.

Now biophilic design includes providing direct and indirect experiences of nature. For instance, a direct experience of nature can be provided by designs that let in lots of natural light. So think windows, think skylights. Providing views of natural settings, water, nature, greenery, even indoor plants, and the literal landscaping of a building, that is plants grown in the building's facade, are examples of biophilic design and the direct experience of nature that can be provided in design. Indirect experiences of nature can be provided through the use of natural materials, natural colors, and simulated natural light. Visual representations of nature such as photos or other media are also ways to provide indirect natural experiences in built design. Natural geometrics, like fractals and the Fibonacci sequence are also recommended. These were common in some periods of architecture, for example, cathedrals built during the Gothic period. There's a bit more to biophilic design, but you get the basic idea. And it's an intriguing idea that may help offset our increasing disconnection from the natural world.

Most environmental psychology research on nature has focused on its benefits in terms of recovery from stress and attention fatigue, but I want to point out that there are some other benefits identified by environmental psychologists. These include the benefit of exercise as nature often provides an opportunity to exercise, which is of course good for your health. We've talked about privacy and the benefits and functions of privacy, and natural environments can offer opportunities for solitude and also for intimacy privacy. Even think about the self-confidence boost that some recreational activities in nature can provide. Climbing that mountain sure can feel like an achievement.

Now the natural environment is also important for some other reasons, and those have to do with the fact that we humans depend on nature for our survival. We need clean air and water. We need arable and fertile soil. Nature also powers the technologies of modern life. We have to be good environmental stewards if we want those to last for our lifetimes and for generations to come. Next week we'll pick up that topic again when we talk about environmental sustainability. Until then, I encourage you to seek out some restorative nature experiences.