Kondo Triguero-Mas Donaire-Gonzalez 2020

 Methods:

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Urban parks comprise the majority of Barcelona’s urban NOE but comprise only between 12 and 17% of urban NOE in other cities. Semi-natural areas comprised 30% of NOE in Stoke-on-Trent, but only between 3 and 11% in other cities. Formal civic space comprised the majority (70%) of urban NOE in Kaunas, and 27% in Barcelona, but only 0.2 and 2.2 percent in Stoke-on-Trent and Doetinchem, respectively. In addition, while almost 90% of non-urban NOE in Stoke-on-Trent and 84% in Doetinchem, was rural or agricultural land, neither Barcelona nor Kaunas contained these types of NOE.

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There is substantial variation in the types of natural outdoor environments (NOE) across the four cities being examined. In Barcelona, the majority of NOE are urban parks, while urban parks make up only a small portion of NOE in the other cities examined. Stoke-on-Trent contains a large portion of semi-natural areas such as semi-managed green spaces, but these semi-natural areas are less frequent in the other cities. In Kaunas, the majority of NOE are made up of formal public areas such as plazas or designated civic spaces. On the other hand, Stoke-on-Trent and Doetinchem are dominated by agricultural rural land, while Barcelona and Kaunas have none.

Introduction:

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This study aims to fill a critical gap in existing nature exposure studies by investigating whether exposure to everyday natural outdoor environments over time is associated with momentary mood among residents of four European cities. We investigate everyday NOE, as opposed to a choreographed exposure condition, in order to capture typical mood responses within individual’s daily routines. As a secondary aim, we explored the potential differential associations between natural outdoor environments and mood by population subgroup.

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This study examines whether experiencing natural outdoor environments (NOE) during everyday life can be linked to people’s mood (examined in four European cities). Researchers examined everyday exposure to NOE, rather than placing the participants in manufactured or controlled nature settings. The aim of this experiment is to demonstrate how nature affects one’s mood in everyday life. The secondary aim of this study is to investigate whether the relationship between mood and NOE varies across different groups, such as by age, gender, city, or other characteristics.

Results:

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Regression estimates of the associations between mood and presence of NOE within the previous 10 min of answering an EMA, adjusted for home city, day of the week, hour of the day, EMA survey type, residential NOE exposure (NDVI), and sex, age, education level, mental health status and neighbourhood SES, are shown in Table 4. When considering scheduled and unscheduled surveys, overall there was a positive relationship between positive affect and NOE exposure (OR: 1.39, 95% CI: 1.06, 1.81).

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Table 4 presents the results of the analysis examining whether exposure to natural outdoor environments (NOE) is associated with people’s mood. The results focus on participants’ mood within 10 minutes of being in NOE and completing the ecological momentary assessment (EMA). The results account for factors such as the participants’ city, day of the week, hour of the day, type of survey taken, participants’ education level, mental health status, and neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES). Overall, a positive relationship was found between being in NOE and experiencing a positive mood, as indicated by both scheduled and unscheduled surveys. Participants were roughly 1.39 times more likely to report feeling positive when they had been in NOE. The 95% confidence interval (1.06-1.81) indicates that the positive effect of NOE in the result is unlikely due to chance.

Discussion:

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While Ecological Momentary Assessment reduces risk of recall bias associated with traditional retrospective surveys, it is still a subjective assessment of mood. Other technologies are developing to capture more objective preferential responses to environments, for instance the use of ambulatory eye trackers (e.g. eye-tracking via the Glass device). However, rather than treat exposure as a general characteristic of place of residence, our use of EMA allowed us to assess participants’ real-time mood responses to environments as they progressed through their daily routines.

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Although Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) reduces memory errors that may occur when participants are asked to recall their past feelings, it remains a subjective assessment as it is based on participants’ self-reports. New technologies continue to be developed in the hope of achieving more objective responses to participants’ environments; for example, ambulatory eye trackers are used to measure, in real-time, where and for how long a participant is looking at their surroundings. Despite this limitation, the use of EMA in this study allows researchers to track participants’ real-time mood responses in relation to their natural outdoor environments (NOE), as they encounter them throughout their daily routine.

Future Directions:

• What future research should follow up on this work?

Future research could expand this study by exploring how specific types of natural outdoor environments (NOE) affect mood over longer periods of time and across more diverse populations. Future research could also combine the ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data with more objective movement-based data, such as heart rate monitors or step trackers, in order to more precisely capture how various types of NOE influence participants’ mental health.

Difficult Material:

• What did you not understand about this paper that someone else may be able to help you with? Or, if you understood everything, what did you find most challenging to understand?

The most challenging part of this paper was my initial read-through, specifically trying to make sense of the data tables, confidence intervals and how they related to the statistical results. I have taken a few statistics courses, which makes me better equipped to understand the statistical jargon, but I can appreciate how confusing this would be for someone who is not familiar with the statistical language being used.