Mountains, Rivers & Waterfalls: Nature's Effect on Communicating Negative Emotions
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2018-05
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Communicating emotions is essential to maintain relationships and to strengthen social bonds. Using an experiment, this study examined if the exposure to scenes of nature increases one’s level of positive emotions, decreases the level of negative emotions, and affects one’s degree of emotion sharing. Women watched either a video of dense vegetation and water (i.e., exposure to nature) or a video of traffic, and the interior of shopping malls and train stations (i.e., exposure to city). Immediately after watching the video, all participants reported how they felt and were asked to write about a painful experience that happened to them recently and their feelings about it. Results show that those who were exposed to nature reported feeling significantly happier, less angry and less fearful compared to those who were exposed to the city. Furthermore, women exposed to nature showed a significant tendency to be more expressive than the women exposed to the city. Those exposed to nature wrote significantly more consequences associated with the event and expressed more pain compared to those who were exposed to the city. Lastly, the odds of suppressing words of anger were 3.8 greater when subjects were exposed to the city than when they were exposed to nature. These results support the hypothesis that exposure to nature promotes emotion sharing by affecting mood. The implications of these findings are discussed.
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Emotions--Social aspects, Language and emotions, Stress (Psychology), Relaxation--Psychological aspects
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