An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers
By J. Haviland-Jones, Holly Hale Rosario, Patricia Wilson, T. McGuire. 2005
182 citations recorded by the source corpus.
For more than 5000 years, people have cultivated flowers although there is no known reward for this costly behavior. In three different studies we show that flowers are a powerful positive emotion “inducer”. In Study 1, flowers, upon presentation to women, always elicited the Duchenne or true smile. Women who received flowers reported more positive moods 3 days later. In Study 2, a flower given to men or women in an elevator elicited more positive social behavior than other stimuli. In Study 3, flowers presented to elderly participants (55+ age) elicited positive mood reports and improved episodic memory. Flowers have immediate and long-term effects on emotional reactions, mood, social behaviors and even memory for both males and females. There is little existing theory in any discipline that explains these findings. We suggest that cultivated flowers are rewarding because they have evolved to rapidly induce positive emotion in humans, just as other plants have evolved to induce varying behavioral responses in a wide variety of species leading to the dispersal or propagation of the plants.
Subfields: Sensory Systems, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09ab8f878cf1d7b74e7df473bedd7762e9e18552
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In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience (2012, background): “(Haviland-Jones et al. 2005:127) Lohr and Pearson-Mims (2006) similarly report that people experience more positive emotions, such as friendliness, and fewer negative emotions, such as sadness, when they are looking at urban scenes with trees than when looking at the same scenes containing…”
- “Green Altruism” (2016, background): “Some scientists have suggested that exposure to flowers and plants elicited a positive mood, which in turn fostered positive social relationships (Guéguen, 2012b; Haviland-Jones et al., 2005), whereas other scientists have suggested that plants elicited social and community aspirations which in turn”