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Feeling unhappy and grumpy? This new study indicates that walking in a public park with trees can make you feel as happy as Christmas Day.
The first study of this kind done by the University of Vermont shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit – and that their mood High lasts as a glow during four hours afterwards.
In fact, scientists have discovered that the effect was so strong that the increase in happiness resulting from a visit to an urban nature outpost equates to the rise of mood at Christmas , which has proven to be by far the happiest day each year on Twitter. .
With more people living in cities and rising rates of mood disorders, this research could have important implications for public health and urban planning.
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The new study was published today in People and nature, an open access journal of the British Ecological Society.
For three months, scientists studied hundreds of tweets a day posted in 160 parks in San Francisco. "We found that in all tweets, people are happier in the parks," says Aaron Schwartz, a UVM graduate student who led the new research, "but the effect was more strong in large regional parks with extensive forest cover and vegetation. "The smaller neighborhood parks posted a lower positive mood, while the generally paved civic squares and squares had the lowest mood elevation.
In other words, it is not only the fact of losing one's work or being outside that brings a positive momentum: the study shows that the greener zones, with more vegetation, have the most great impact. It should be noted that one of the words that shows the biggest hike used in park tweets is "flowers".
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"In the cities, large green spaces are very important for people's sense of well-being," says Schwartz. which means that efforts to protect and expand urban natural areas go far beyond luxury and second-level concerns. "We are seeing more and more evidence that it is essential to promote mental health," said Taylor Ricketts, co-author of the new study and director of the UVM's Gund Institute for Environment.
In recent years, "conservation has focused on monetary benefits – like: how many dollars of flood damage have we avoided by restoring a wetland?" Ricketts said. "But this study is part of a new wave of research that extends beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct benefits to the health of nature. What is even more innovative here is the emphasis on mental health benefits, which have been very underrated and under-researched. "
The new study relies on the hedonometer. This online instrument, invented by a team of UVM scientists and The MITRE Corporation, has collected and analyzed billions of tweets for more than ten years. This has resulted in numerous scientific articles and extensive global media coverage. The instrument uses a body of about 10,000 common words that have been noted by a large group of volunteers for what scientists call their "psychological valence," a kind of measure of the emotional temperature of each word.
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The volunteers rated the words they perceived as the happiest at the top on a scale of 1 to 9; sad words near the bottom. By averaging the responses of the volunteers, each word received a score: "happy" itself ranked 8.30, "hahaha" 7.94 and "parks" 7.14. Really neutral words, "and" and "the" scored 5.22 and 4.98. At the bottom, "trapped", 3.08, "crash", 2.60 and "prison", 1.76. "Flowers" scored a nice 7.56.
Using these scores, the team collects about 50 million tweets every day from around the world. "Then we throw all the words into a huge bucket," says Dodds, and we calculate the average happiness score of the bucket.
To carry out this new study, the UVM team exploited the tweets of this huge stream (4,688 users who publicly identify their location), geolocated with latitude and longitude in the city of San Francisco. This allowed the team to know which tweets came from which parks. "Then, in collaboration with the US Forest Service, we developed new techniques for mapping vegetation in urban areas, with a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods," says Jarlath O-Neil Dunne, director of the UVM. Space Analysis Laboratory of the School of Environment and Natural Resources UVM Rubenstein and co-author of the new study. "That's what really helped us understand the relationship between greenery and vegetation in these urban areas and people's feelings."
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"This is the first study that uses Twitter to examine how user sentiment changes before, during and after visits to different types of parks," says Schwartz, PhD student at Rubenstein School and Gund Institute. . "Greener parks show greater momentum."
Overall, the tweets posted in these San Francisco city parks were happier by 0.23 points on the Hedonometer scale compared to the baseline. "This increase in sentiment is equivalent to that of Christmas Day for Twitter as a whole the same year," write the scientists.
"Being out in the wild offers restorative benefits on dimensions not available for purchase in a store or downloadable on a screen," says Chris Danforth of the UVM, professor of mathematics and researcher at the Gund Institute. He notes that a growing body of research shows an association between time spent in nature and improved mood, "but the specific causal links are hard to pin down."
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The team of UVM scientists is examining several possible mechanisms by which urban nature can improve mental health, including the theory of the green mind that suggests that the brain negativity bias, "which may have been advantageous from the point of view of evolution – is constantly activated by the stressors of modern life, "the team writes.
"Although we do not discuss causality in our study, we find that negative language – such as" no "," no "," no "," can not "- decreased immediately after mid-visit Danforth, Danforth explains, by providing specific linguistic benchmarks for mood enhancement available externally, while the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns – "me" and "me" – dramatically disappears in the parks, perhaps indicating "a shift from an individual mental frame to a collective mental frame," the scientists write.
Of course, Twitter users are not a representative sample of all people, perhaps just "Twitter afflicted" (as Adam Gopnik wrote in a recent issue of New Yorker) who pick up their phone to tweet in a park. However, previous research shows that Twitter users are a large demographic group. This approach to near real-time remote sensing via Twitter publications (not based on self-declaration) offers a new window to scientists on the changing moods of very large groups.
Reprinted from the University of Vermont
Plant a bit of positivity by sharing thetreeDo some research with your friends on social media …
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