Abstract
Interacting with urban spaces that are green and blue is believed to promote mental well-being and positive emotions. Therefore, there is an incentive to strategically design urban forest landscapes in a given space to evoke more positive emotion. In this study, we conducted a pilot study in Northeast China with 24 parks from 11 cities across 3 provinces. The subjects of the study are the visitors and a total of 1145 photos and selfies were collected from open micro-twitters in Sino Weibo (~50 individuals per park). Facial expressions of happy and sad emotions were recognized and rated as percent scores by FireFACE v1.0. Demographically, male adolescents smiled more than male visitors in other age groups and female teens. Females expressed more positive emotions than males according to their positive response index (PRI; happy-sad). Multivariate linear regression indicated positive contribution of green space to happy scores (estimate of 0.0040) and a stronger negative contribution of blue area to sad scores (estimate of −0.1392). Therefore, an urban forest landscape can be optimized by mapping green- and blue-spaces to predict spatial distributions of positive emotions. Male teens are recommended more as frequent visitors than people in other age ranges.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Hongxu Wei and Richard J
In urban forest parks of Northeast China, people may be not so happy when interacting with blue spaces compared to interacting with forests, but there is a strong motivation to hide their negative emotion
We established a dataset of a total of 1145 photos from Sina Weibo on the faces of visitors of urban forest parks of Northeast China
Summary
Academic Editors: Hongxu Wei and Richard J. There is a wide consensus that interacting with nature can have immense positive effects on mental health [2]
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