Abstract
In this research, we investigated whether soundscapes’ animateness and the framing of environments affect participants’ assessment of the surroundings and their predicted recreation time. In an online study, we showed the participants six stimuli, each consisting of an animate or inanimate soundscape recording and of a verbal label of a natural or urban environment. We asked them to (a) imagine visiting the presented locations while mentally fatigued, in company or alone; (b) to visualize spending time there while engaged in recreational activities; and (c) to assess the environment and the predicted recreation time. We found that environments with animate soundscapes were rated as having a higher degree of naturalness and were favored in the urban condition. Environments with inanimate soundscapes, meanwhile, were preferred in the natural condition. Furthermore, natural-framed soundscapes were evaluated as having a higher degree of naturalness and were preferred over urban-framed soundscapes. Social context did not affect the results; however, we discovered the indirect effect of natural labels on the recreation time through the naturalness of the environments, both for the environments with animate and inanimate soundscapes. Overall, our findings demonstrate the influence of soundscapes’ animateness and framing on the settings’ evaluations and on recreation time.
Highlights
When, in a 2017 documentary entitled “Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees,” the famous British actress uncovered the inner life of trees with the help of a team of experts, she was surprised to hear the sound of water traveling up the trunk and stunned to discover that trees form a community, within which they are able to communicate and cooperate when needed
Despite the violation of the assumption of homogeneity of variance for inanimate soundscapes (p = 0.001), we continued the analysis based on the presumption that when sample sizes are close to equal, ANOVA is quite robust to heterogeneity of variance [42]
There was, a significant main effect of animateness of the soundscapes, F(1, 168) = 258.10, p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.61, as environments presented with animate soundscapes were perceived as having a higher degree of naturalness (M = 74.77, SD = 16.44) than those shown with inanimate soundscapes (M = 51.91, SD = 17.80)
Summary
In a 2017 documentary entitled “Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees,” the famous British actress uncovered the inner life of trees with the help of a team of experts, she was surprised to hear the sound of water traveling up the trunk and stunned to discover that trees form a community, within which they are able to communicate and cooperate when needed. Our understanding of the effect of animateness on the evaluation of our surroundings or our willingness to spend time in such locations remains incomplete: because research hitherto has focused rather on the natural–urban dichotomy, more subtle differentiation between animate and inanimate environments was given much less consideration. Public Health 2020, 17, 9086; doi:10.3390/ijerph17239086 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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