There’s no place like home? The physiological and psychological effects of going outside from the indoor home environment to urban environments, a field experiment on women from two ethnic groups

Abstract

Background: Previous field studies evaluated the effects of visit to different outdoor urban environments on short-term psychological, cognitive and physiological responses. Less is known on the effect of going outside from the indoor home environment to these urban environments. Aim: To evaluate whether visits to different urban and ethnic environments, in comparison to home indoor environment, leads to short-term responses and whether these are independent of ethnicity. Methods: The participants, 20-35 year-old healthy women (N=72, 48 Arab and 24 Jewish), started the experiment at their home and visited six different outdoor urban environments in predominantly ethnic Arab or Jewish cities, in Israel. First they visited intra-ethnic city and afterward inter-ethnic city environments. In each city they visited an urban park, a residential neighborhood and the city center. In each environment (including home) the following measures were evaluated: mood (measured as positive and negative emotions, cheerfulness, relaxed, natural and discomfort feelings), working memory (measured with backwards digit-span task) and autonomic nervous system (assessed using heart rate variability (HRV)). Several potential mediators were measured: carbon monoxide (CO), heat, noise, social aspects, and the self-perceived restoration scale. Results: Going outside from home, to both intra and inter-ethnic parks, was associated with beneficial psychological, physiological, and cognitive responses, and the strongest effects were found for the intra-ethnic park. The results for the other urban environments were different between Jewish and Arab women. The self-perceived restoration, the social aspects and reduced CO, heat and noise exposures during the visits did not explain the observed changes between the outdoor environments and home. Conclusions: Visits to urban parks compared to the home demonstrated short-term beneficial changes in the outcomes that could not be attributed to the investigated mediators. Women should be encouraged to go outdoors and specifically visit parks to improve their psycho-physiological health.