2.1 Emotion and cognition in nature

In Activity 3, you learned about the evidence that views of nature seem to have a positive impact on people’s well-being. There are different theories as to why this might be.

Some researchers have focused on the emotional experience of nature. People have been found to experience feelings of ‘awe’ in natural environments, meaning a feeling of wonder and reverence in the face of something greater than themselves (Van Cappellen & Rime, 2013). Feelings of awe have been found to be particularly strong when people are absorbed or captivated by a natural scene. Awe involves a sense of being connected to the wider world and has a function of taking the person outside of themselves, known as experiencing a ‘small self’ (Bai et al., 2017). Feeling connected is a vital part of well-being, while a ‘small self’ seems to help shift people’s attention away from their individual concerns and towards other people. Focusing and ruminating on problems is well-established to be something that can prolong and deepen experiences of both anxiety and depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000).

Another major area of research has looked at the impact that nature can have on the way that people think, known as ‘cognition.’ The aspect of thinking of most interest here is attention. Attention means a state of conscious focus. If you think about paying attention to something you might be listening hard, or reading something in a concentrated way, or following a particular event or story in the news. Something that you are not paying attention to, on the other hand, is still happening but it is outside of your awareness.

Psychologists who study attention tend to think of this both as a skill and a resource. People can train themselves to be able to sustain attention for longer, for instance through mindfulness training. There is also evidence that people’s capacity for attention can be worn out or drained by overuse, as well as restored by rest. This is where nature comes in. The earliest research in this area, by Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) compared how well people’s attention was restored by looking either built environment or natural scenes. They found that after viewing natural scenes, people performed better on tests measuring attention than the city scenes. In the following activity you will learn about a study that looked at these processes in everyday life.

Activity 4: Coping with difficult life events

15 minutes

In a study from the early 2000s, Frances Kuo worked with women living in a social housing estate (‘a project’) in Chicago, US. In this estate, residents were housed in tower blocks, pictured below. Some of the blocks had no trees surrounding them (pictured on the left) and some blocks were surrounded by trees (pictured on the right).

This provided a comparison between women whose everyday views from their home included nature, and those who did not. This is known as a ‘natural experiment’ – when something in the world provides a comparison between two groups who are otherwise similar.

1. Kuo compared women living in these blocks on measures of attention and memory. From what you know of the research in this area, who would you predict performed better on these tests?

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Answer

The women who could see trees performed better on these tests. This finding seems to support the idea that views of nature, even limited, can help to restore cognitive capacities including attention.

2. In the study, women were asked about the difficulties they faced in their everyday life. This could include money problems, relationship difficulties, parenting issues, and other everyday stresses and strains.

The women had similar levels of difficult life events, but the women with a view of trees rated these events as less important and less long-lasting than the women with no view of trees.

How could you explain this difference, using the concepts you’ve learned about in this course?

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Answer

This finding implies that while both groups of women had the same level of difficult life events, as women navigating living in poverty, these issues seemed to weigh less heavily on women who had a view of nature in their daily view. Kuo explains this finding as showing that nature can restore attention, leaving more cognitive capacity to deal with ongoing life issues and cope with them more easily. You may have also thought about the emotional impacts of nature discussed above – particularly the way that nature is thought to produce feelings of a ‘small self’ where a person might ruminate less on their individual concerns. This pattern seems to track with women rating their problems as less important when they were able to view trees.

In the next section you will learn about the role of relationships in people’s experience of places and environments.