Natural Is Not Always Better: The Varied Effects of a Natural Environment and Exercise on Affect and Cognition

Janet P Trammell,Shaya C Aguilar

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575245

Abstract

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) has been widely cited to account for beneficial effects of natural environments on affect and attention. However, the effects of environment and exercise are not consistent. In a within-subjects design, participants completed affective and cognitive measures that varied in attentional demands (memory, working memory, and executive function) both before and after exercise in a natural and indoor environment. Contrary to the hypotheses, a natural environment resulted in lower positive affect and no difference in negative affect compared to an indoor environment. A natural environment resulted in the most improvement for cognitive tasks that required moderate attentional demand: Trail Making Test A and Digit Span Forwards. As predicted, exercise resulted in improved affect and improved executive function (Trail Making Test B). There were no interactions between environment and exercise. These results suggest that ART cannot fully explain the influence of environment on affect and cognition.

Highlights

Nature is more than a physical environment; it is an environment that can both restore and enhance the mind and behavior
There was a significant main effect of exercise on happiness, F (1, 27) = 5.64, p = 0.03, ηp2 = 0.17, such that participants were happier after exercise than they were before exercise
There was a significant main effect of exercise on stress, F (1, 27) = 14.03, p = 0.001, and ηp2 = 0.34, such that participants were less stressed after exercise than they were before exercise, see Table 1

Summary

Introduction

Nature is more than a physical environment; it is an environment that can both restore and enhance the mind and behavior. It is well established that time spent in natural environments is associated with beneficial outcomes for mental health, such as increases in positive affect and decreases in stress, negative affect, anger, fatigue, and sadness (see Bowler et al, 2010, and McMahan and Estes, 2015, for a review of affective benefits; but see Gascon et al, 2015 for limitations) These natural environments typically contain green and/or blue spaces; green spaces are spacious, lush, serene, and include vegetation such as trees, grass, forests, and parks, whereas blue spaces include all kinds of water such as lakes, rivers, and the ocean (Gascon et al, 2015). This “soft fascination” is in contrast to the direct and focused

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Conclusion