Abstract
The Mayo Clinic and the American Psychiatric Association recognize that many people experience stress around the holidays. For example, households with children, people living alone, etc. during the Christmas holiday might be feeling mentally fatigued or maybe they simply want to improve their mental state. We aimed to investigate the extent to which Christmas tree shopping environments that include real trees in the outdoors (a common type of biophilic store design) provide opportunities to help them recover from mental and attentional fatigue (derived from Attention Restoration Theory) when compared to artificial indoor tree displays. A nationwide online survey (n=1208, 45 questions, and two video evaluations) was used to compare real-time and post video evaluations of outdoor displays of real Christmas trees with indoor displays of artificial Christmas trees using two measures of overall perceived restorative quality. The key finding indicates that real/outdoor trees have a higher perceived restorative quality (real-time video evaluation p <.05 and post-video evaluation p <.001). Although the fascination ratings for artificial/indoor tree ratings were significantly higher (p <.01), it had a much weaker effect than real trees (less than half) on overall restorative quality. That is, although indoor artificial trees were more fascinating, it appears to be the kind of “hard” fascination that does not contribute nearly as much to restoration when compared to the “softer” fascination associated with real trees. The positive effect of coherence (e.g., orderly tree displays) and scope (e.g., perception of depth and spaciousness) on overall restorative quality that was perceived by respondents was greater for real/outdoor tree displays. These larger effects were measured in a multivariate multiple regression model but also identified in most of the peak restorative moments during the video evaluation.
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