Green spaces stimulate the mood as much as Christmas Day

According to a new study, a trip to the park increases the happiness of people of an amount similar to that of Christmas.

The more trees and vegetation of the park are numerous, the greater the effect of mood stimulation is important, explained the researchers.

Watching the flowers was one of the key elements that pleased park visitors.

In the study, visitors to parks and cities used happier words and expressed less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit.

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Mood Elevation: For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont in the United States studied hundreds of tweets a day posted by people posted in 160 San Francisco parks.

The researchers also discovered that their high mood had lasted – like a glow – until four hours later.

The effect is 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 is the happiest day each year on Twitter.

The researchers argue that planners should give parks a higher priority because of their effects on mental health.

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont, USA, studied hundreds of tweets a day posted in 160 parks in San Francisco.

Aaron Schwartz, head of research, said, "We found that in all tweets, people are happier in the parks. But the effect was more pronounced in large regional parks where vegetation and trees were very extensive.

People visiting smaller neighborhood parks had a lower positive mood and paved civic places led to the lowest rise in mood. Mr. Schwartz said that one of the words showing that the biggest increase in use in park tweets was "flowers".

Co-author Professor Taylor Ricketts said, "In cities, large green spaces are very important to people's sense of well-being.

"We are seeing more and more evidence that it is essential for the promotion of mental health."

The happiness of tweets has been evaluated with the help of a "hedonometer", an online tool that evaluates the happiness of 10,000 common words in terms of happiness and sadness on a scale of one (the most happy) to nine (the saddest).

For example, "happy" itself was at 8.30 and "hahaha" at 7.94, while neutral words such as "trapped", "blocked", "crash", 2.60 and "prison" , 1.76. & # 39; Flowers & # 39; scored 7.56.

Mood measured in tweet content: people visiting smaller neighborhood parks had a lower positive mood, and paved civic places led to lower mood elevation

With the help of scores, the team collects more than 50 million tweets from around the world every day before calculating the average happiness score.

Overall, tweets posted in San Francisco City Parks were happier by 0.23 points on the Hedonometer scale compared to the baseline.

Professor Ricketts said, "This increase in sentiment is equivalent to that of Christmas Day for Twitter as a whole the same year."

Professor Chris Danforth, of Vermont, said, "Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions not available for purchase in a store or downloadable on a screen."

Professor Danforth added: "Although our study does not deal with causality, we find that negative language – such as" no "," no "," do not "," can not "- decreased immediately in the period after visits to urban parks, offering specific linguistic benchmarks of the mood burst available to the outside. & # 39;

In contrast, he stated that the study showed that the use of first person pronouns – "me" and "me" – was dramatically decreasing in the parks, perhaps indicating "A transition from the individual mental framework to the collective framework".

The results were published in People and Nature.