Happiness is greater in natural environments

By G. MacKerron, S. Mourato. 2013

811 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Links between wellbeing and environmental factors are of growing interest in psychology, health, conservation, economics, and more widely. There is limited evidence that green or natural environments are positive for physical and mental health and wellbeing. We present a new and unique primary research study exploring the relationship between momentary subjective wellbeing (SWB) and individuals’ immediate environment within the UK. We developed and applied an innovative data collection tool: a smartphone app that signals participants at random moments, presenting a brief questionnaire while using satellite positioning (GPS) to determine geographical coordinates. We used this to collect over one million responses from more than 20,000 participants. Associating GPS response locations with objective spatial data, we estimate a model relating land cover to SWB using only the within-individual variation, while controlling for weather, daylight, activity, companionship, location type, time, day, and any response trend. On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments. These findings are robust to a number of alternative models and model specifications. This study provides a new line of evidence on links between nature and wellbeing, strengthening existing evidence of a positive relationship between SWB and exposure to green or natural environments in daily life. Our results have informed the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), and the novel geo-located experience sampling methodology we describe has great potential to provide new insights in a range of areas of interest to policymakers.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8630b75495be4d4eecd625c8a612ffc7b095dd33

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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Are Some Natural Environments More Psychologically Beneficial Than Others? The Importance of Type and Quality on Connectedness to Nature and Psychological Restoration (2019, background): “Fortunately, the 6 time frame for surveying was fairly short, so the potential for memory bias was smaller than it might have been if 7 asking about visits more than a few days ago (cf. Mackerron & Mourato, 2013).”
Lab And/Or Field? Measuring Personality Processes and Their Social Consequences (2015, background): “Yet, recent studies show that sufficiently large and heterogenous samples are possible when using participants’ own smartphone (Mappiness project, http://www.mappiness.org.uk, MacKerron & Mourato, 2013; Social Fabric project, http://socialfabric.ku.dk).”
The value of Twitter data for determining the emotional responses of people to urban green spaces: A case study and critical evaluation (2019, result): “Happiness was present in the highest frequencies in each season, consistent with previous studies reporting happiness as a key response to green space and nature (MacKerron and Mourato, 2013).”
Nature at home and at work: Naturally good? Links between window views, indoor plants, outdoor activities and employee well-being over one year (2017, background): “This is intersting as there is evidence that momentary happiness in natural environments is greater than in urban environments (MacKerron & Mourato, 2013).”
Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use (2015, background): “This ubiquity means that there is the potential for objective smartphone data to be used to address research questions in the real world [2].”
Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience (2014, background): “20 The Mappiness developers note that between-individual confounding should not be a factor because their model is estimated exclusively from within-individual variation (MacKerron and Mourato, 2013).”
Noticing nature: Individual and social benefits of a two-week intervention (2017, background): “Even after controlling for variables including weather, time of day, activity, companionship, location type and day of the week, people are, in general, substantially happier when they are in nature, compared to when they are in a human-built environment (MacKerron & Mourato, 2013).”
The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: a meta-analysis (2014, background): “Given that people are spending the vast majority of their time indoors (Evans and McCoy, 1998; MacKerron and Mourato, 2013) and the increasing urbanization of the world's population (United Nations Population Division, 2002), many of us may be missing out on the beneficial effects of connecting to…”
Engaging with Natural Beauty May Be Related to Well-Being Because It Connects People to Nature: Evidence from Three Cultures (2017, positive): “…and stress reduction (Ulrich et al., 1991), an abundance of research demonstrates that people tend to feel and function better when nature is near (Capaldi, Passmore, Nisbet, Zelenski, & Dopko, 2015; Howell & Passmore, 2013; MacKerron & Mourato, 2013; McMahan & Estes, 2015; Russell et al., 2013).”
Tracking technologies and urban analysis: Adding the emotional dimension (2018, methodology): “MacKerron and Mourato (2013) used an iPhone application to gather repeated reports of momentary happiness at random times, finding that participants tended to be happier in green or natural environments than in urban environments Ettema and Smajic (2015) utilized smartphones to record in-situ,…”
Cooperation is in our nature: Nature exposure may promote cooperative and environmentally sustainable behavior (2015, neutral): “Despite nature's apparent benefits, most people spend the majority of their time indoors away from nature (MacKerron & Mourato, 2013).”