By Pauline Thébault, Marion Soret and Aude Naud
You have worked all day long in an office located in a noisy street with a lot of trafic. There are roadworks a few streets away, it is hot, you share your room with three other people, and you are late to make your report. At 6:00 pm, you turn off your computer, leave your office and go out on the street to go home. However, even though you have finished your day, you do not feel more relaxed, but on the contrary, you re-work all the work you still have to do, you feel assaulted by the noise and people around you. On the way back, you pass by a park, and you decide tout go there without knowing why and to get there a few minutes before going home. You are not aware of it but you just had an excellent idea to reduce your daily stress !
Stress situations occur when our adaptive capacities are not sufficiant anymore to cope with our environment. Contact with nature has the amazing effect of restoring those adaptive capabilites, whether biological, psychological or social. This restorative effect occurs in two ways.
According to Kaplan (1995), a natural environment allows to restore our directed attention. Directed attention makes us able to ignore unnecessary stimuli to concentrate on the task to realise, whether complex or not, by inhibiting non-interesting stimuli. Our directed attention is particularly easily tired and it diminishes all day long gradually as we concentrate ourselves. A low directed attention can lead to being irritable, tired, and less performant. But it can be restored by what Kaplan calls fascination, which is a state in which inhibitoring abilites of our brain are not sollicitated, allowing to regenerate them. Fascination happens when we try to give a sense to our environment, giving attention to what surrounds us, with no selection (physical elements, events…). Our attention is used in a lighter and more flexible way, leaving more resources available to perform other tasks simultaneously or later. However, to make fascination efficient, the person has to feel psychologically away from her work and her preoccupations, and has to be in an environment large and rich enough to prolong fascination in time. Finally, this environment has to match with the person’s inclinations and aspirations, and with what she can, wants or has to do in this one. Natural environments respond very well to those criteria, although other types of environments can have this restorative effect. More recent researches have demonstrated that natural environment also restores creativity and innovative or holistic thoughts, as showed by Atchley, Strayer and Atchley (2012) or Leong, Fischer and McClure (2014). Holistic thougths are opposed to analytic thoughts, which means that you take account of all the environment and the situation when you try to resolve a problem, and your mind is open to more creative solutions.
Ulrich, as for him, recalls the natural environment’s ability to reduce psychophysiologic stress. According to him, restorative effect of an environment depends on the transformation of our negative feelings into pleasant and calm feelings. It happens when the environment does not provide enough informations to be cognitively evaluated but nevertheless arouses an affective response, which would be more observable in natural environments. This decrease of stress is observable by different psycophysiological measures, like heart rate, skin conductance or blood pressure (Ulrich, Simons, Losito, Fiorito, Miles & Zelson, 1991).
So, given those studies and results, natural environments have a very positive effect on people’s well-being. This influence is observable in totally natural environments, but also in urban environment where there is natural features, like flowered balcony, parks, trees, plant walls, etc.
According to the restorativeness theory, it seems to be important to promote the implantation of nature and green spaces in all our life environments, especially in urban ones !
Atchley, R.A., Strayer, D.L. & Atchley, P. (2012). Creativity in the wild : improving creative reasonning through immersion in natural settings. PloS ONE 7(12): e51474. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051474.
Hartig, T. (2004). Restorative environments. Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, 3, 273-279.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature : toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environment Psychology, 15, 169-182.
Leong, L.Y.C., Fischer, R., & McClure, J. (2014). Are nature lovers more innovative ? The relationship between connectedness with nature and cognitive styles. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40, 57-63. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.03.007.
Ulrich, R.S., Simons, R.F., Losito, B.D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M.A,. & Zelson, M. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11, 201-230.
I study occupational psychology, social and environmental psychology at the University of Nantes. After my graduation, I studied law for one year. I come from Luçon in Vendée.
After my studies I would like to work as a social psychologist to promote ecology and sustainable behaviours.