Abstract
Many university students have been struggling with multiple challenges that may cause mental fatigue. Exposure to the natural environment is found to have restorative effects on mental fatigue, which can be explained by its benefits in physiological, psychological, and cognitive aspects. While the natural environment contains both visual and auditory elements, research on the effects of auditory elements, such as nature sounds, is underdeveloped and limited to laboratory settings. It remains unclear what are the effects of exposure to nature sounds in daily life settings. The study was conducted with 71 students from a university, who were randomly assigned to the experimental group using a nature-sound mobile application in daily life and the control group not using the application. After a 4-week exposure to the intervention, the students in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group on psychological well-being reflected in positive affect, as well as cognitive performance reflected in flow state, attention (in terms of alerting) and working memory (in terms of accuracy and reaction time). The findings reveal the positive impact of exposure to relaxing nature sounds on university students’ psychological well-being and cognitive performance, as well as the potential of mobile applications to provide easy exposure to nature sounds.
Highlights
Modern society offers various opportunities for university students to learn, play, and live
This study focused on the followings research questions (RQs): RQ1: Does exposure to nature sounds through a mobile application in daily life impact on psychological well-being among university students? RQ2: Does exposure to nature sounds through a mobile application in daily life impact on cognitive performance among university students?
The results of the study show that after the 4-week exposure to nature sounds through the mobile application, students in the experimental condition outperformed their counterparts in the control groups on psychological well-being and cognitive performance in some respects
Summary
Modern society offers various opportunities for university students to learn, play, and live. University students are often busy with daily schedules such as attending lectures, working on projects, and participating in academic and social events (Abbott, 2015). They experience external pressure in peer competition and job-seeking practices (Stieger et al, 2020). These experiences may make them feel mentally exhausted, so called mental fatigue (Kaplan, 1987) – the Effects of Nature-Sound Mobile Application psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity (Marcora et al, 2009). Engagement in the extensive use of ICTs or media multitasking is likely to exert a negative influence on students’ psychological well-being and cognitive performance (e.g., Young, 1998; Park et al, 2011; Shapiro and Margolin, 2014; Uncapher and Wagner, 2018; Luo et al, 2020a, 2020b)
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