Abstract
Reducing the burden of pain via greenspace exposure is a rising research topic. However, insufficient evidence has been found in relation to the environmental effect itself. Residential greenspace, as a convenient but limited natural environment for urban dwellers, has benefits and services yet to be discovered. Therefore, the current study recruited 24 young adults to evaluate the effects of physical visit to, or image viewing of, residential greenspace on pain perception and related psychophysiological outcomes, via simulated pain. Pain threshold and tolerance were recorded via the level of pain stimuli, and pain intensity was evaluated using the Visual Analog Scale (VAS). The state scale of the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-S) and two adjective pairs were employed to measure the state anxiety and subjective stress, respectively. Meanwhile, heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and blood pressure (BP) were measured to investigate physiological responses. Besides, Scenic Beauty Estimation (SBE) was also employed to assess participants’ preference regarding the experimental environments. The results revealed that visiting the greenspace significantly increased the pain threshold and tolerance, while no significant effect was observed for image viewing. On the other hand, no significant difference was observed in pain-related psychophysiological indices between the experimental settings, but significantly negative associations were found between the scores of SBE and subjective stress and state anxiety. In conclusion, the current study brings experimental evidence of improving pain experience via residential greenspace exposure, while the related psychophysiological benefits require further investigation.
Highlights
Nature exposure is associated with a range of positive impacts on humans and society
The ambient temperature and noise were measured during the experiment, and no statistically significant difference was found between the three settings
There was no statistically significant difference observed in the baseline psychophysiological outcomes between the three settings
Summary
Nature exposure is associated with a range of positive impacts on humans and society. Thereafter, the services of nature have been gradually revealed, and visual stimulus was found to play a key role in human–nature interactions [2], which may effectively improve psychophysiological states [3,4,5]. According to previous studies, the state of immersion in natural environments is found to induce sophisticated psychophysiological changes. These findings underline the advantage of physical interaction with nature [12,13]. The above positive effects were obtained in highly natural environments, such as forests and lakes, and whether a visit to an urban greenspace can elicit similar health benefits is still unclear [12,13]
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