Stress Recovery during Exposure to Nature Sound and Environmental Noise

By J. Alvarsson, Stefan Wiens, Mats E. Nilsson. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2010

832 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research suggests that visual impressions of natural compared with urban environments facilitate recovery after psychological stress. To test whether auditory stimulation has similar effects, 40 subjects were exposed to sounds from nature or noisy environments after a stressful mental arithmetic task. Skin conductance level (SCL) was used to index sympathetic activation, and high frequency heart rate variability (HF HRV) was used to index parasympathetic activation. Although HF HRV showed no effects, SCL recovery tended to be faster during natural sound than noisy environments. These results suggest that nature sounds facilitate recovery from sympathetic activation after a psychological stressor.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Social Psychology, Speech and Hearing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b994d3f3b1ee353ce9ada9a756acaef11afd6d6

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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

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Citations in the corpus

How might contact with nature promote human health? Promising mechanisms and a possible central pathway (2015, background): “High temperatures can cause heat exhaustion, heat-related aggression and violence, and respiratory distress due to heat-related smog formation (Anderson, 2001; Akbari, 2002; Tawatsupa et al., 2012).”
Bird sounds and their contributions to perceived attention restoration and stress recovery (2013, background): “In the context of SRT, Alvarsson et al. (2010) found that a similar natural soundscape (birdsong and running water) was rated as more pleasant than sounds from the built environment, and induced faster recovery from stress as measured by skin conductance level.”
A dose of nature: Tree cover, stress reduction, and gender differences (2014, methodology): “Following the procedures of many previous studies, we measured skin conductance to assess stress and stress reduction (e.g., Alvarsson et al., 2010; Carrillo et al., 2001; De Kort, Meijnders, Sponselee, & Ijsselsteijn, 2006; Hsiao-Pei, Hung-Yu, Wei-Lun, & Chih-Wei, 2011; Ulrich et al., 1991).”
Soundscape descriptors and a conceptual framework for developing predictive soundscape models (2016, background): “Alvarsson et al. (2010) investigated the effects of stress recovery in persons listening to sounds of nature or noise, measuring skin conductance level Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 149, 2016, Pages 65に74 and high frequency heart rate variability.”
Evaluating restoration in urban green spaces: Does setting type make a difference? (2014, background): “Future experiments could also manipulate other theoretically elevant physical characteristics such as variations in topography r the presence of water (Ulrich, 1983), and additional variables ike sounds (Alvarsson et al., 2010), the presence of others (Staats Hartig, 2004), or medium of presentation”
Trees, grass, or concrete? The effects of different types of environments on stress reduction (2020, methodology): “SCLs are an unbiased measure of sympathetic activity via the electric impulses on the skin’s surface and sweat glands, which are innervated only by the sympathetic nervous system (SNS Alvarsson, Wiens, & Nilsson, 2010; Cummings, El-Sheikh, Kouros, & Keller, 2007), whose major function is to stimulat”
Inducing physiological stress recovery with sounds of nature in a virtual reality forest--results from a pilot study. (2013, background): “We supposed this would be partly due to the effect of such sounds themselves [27] and partly to the resulting increased sense of reality in the virtual environment.”
Biophilic Design for Restorative University Learning Environments: A Critical Review of Literature and Design Recommendations (2020, background): “water are proven to speed up Directed Attention recovery times after stressors as tracked through physiological changes [67].”
A Review of Psychological Literature on the Health and Wellbeing Benefits of Biophilic Design (2015, background): “Water has also been found to be restorative, both through views of water [12] and sounds of water [24].”