Neuroscience
The idea that nature can have a rejuvenating effect is of course not new. “There's joy in the mountains; There's life in the fountains; Small clouds are sailing; Blue sky prevailing”, wrote William Wordsworth back in 1802.
But if we can't reach the countryside, what about the benefit of looking at nature in photos or on TV? Yvonee de Kort and colleagues believe that crucial to such media having a beneficial effect is how immersed in the simulated natural environment an observer feels.
To test this, 80 participants watched a ten-minute nature film after being stressed out by an arithmetic task conducted in a noisy environment. Half the participants watched the video on a massive 72-inch screen, the other half on a 31-inch screen. Measures of the participants' skin conductance and heart beat showed participants who watched the big screen calmed down more quickly after the maths test than did participants who watched the small screen.
The researchers said: “If a relatively moderate and simple screen size manipulation is effective, a more immersive environment – that is, extensive, multimodal or interactive – should definitely have potential, for instance for therapeutic use”.
____________________________________
de Kort, Y.A.W., Meijinders, A.L., Sponselee, A.A.G. & Ijsselsteijn, W.A. (2007). What's wrong with virtual trees? Restoring from stress in a mediated environment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 26, 309-320.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Nature video is more calming when viewed on a big screen
The idea that nature can have a rejuvenating effect is of course not new. “There's joy in the mountains; There's life in the fountains; Small clouds are sailing; Blue sky prevailing”, wrote William Wordsworth back in 1802.But if we can't reach the countryside, what about the benefit of looking at nature in photos or on TV? Yvonee de Kort and colleagues believe that crucial to such media having a beneficial effect is how immersed in the simulated natural environment an observer feels.
To test this, 80 participants watched a ten-minute nature film after being stressed out by an arithmetic task conducted in a noisy environment. Half the participants watched the video on a massive 72-inch screen, the other half on a 31-inch screen. Measures of the participants' skin conductance and heart beat showed participants who watched the big screen calmed down more quickly after the maths test than did participants who watched the small screen.
The researchers said: “If a relatively moderate and simple screen size manipulation is effective, a more immersive environment – that is, extensive, multimodal or interactive – should definitely have potential, for instance for therapeutic use”.
____________________________________
de Kort, Y.A.W., Meijinders, A.L., Sponselee, A.A.G. & Ijsselsteijn, W.A. (2007). What's wrong with virtual trees? Restoring from stress in a mediated environment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 26, 309-320.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Colours Affect Mental Performance, With Blue Boosting Creativity
Paint the walls blue to boost your creativity. That's the message from an intriguing new study that shows the contrasting effects of blue and red on mental performance. Psychologists have known for some time that colours can affect cognition, but...
- Don't Ditch Your Paper Maps Just Yet
You might think that hand-held global positioning systems (GPS), which can provide a live update of your location and surroundings, would make the benefit of a paper map redundant. But in a new study, Toru Ishikawa and colleagues have shown that people...
- Manual Training For A Mind-bending Task
Rotating objects in our mind's eye is a bit like doing it in the real world. For example, when asked to judge if one shape is a rotated version of another, the time it takes us to answer correlates with the angular discrepancy between the two shapes....
- Magic Trick Fools Us But Not Our Eyes
The magician throws the ball twice into the air and catches it, then he throws it a third time and it vanishes! Of course, he’s really secreted the ball in the palm of his hand, so why do so many observers believe they’ve seen the ball vanish mid-flight?...
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