How Enjoying Nature Benefits Well-Being in People's Everyday Lives

Stefanie Kley , University of Hamburg
Tetiana Dovbischuk, New York University
Johannes Huinink, University of Bremen
Jutta Heckhausen, University of California at Irvine

In a world characterized by rapid urbanization and high shares of time spent indoors, we need to know, whether and to which extent nature experience might help to reduce the global burden of disease attributable to mental illness. Numerous previous studies have shown that positive and negative affect has important associations with overall physical health. We analyzed people’s affective responses to experiencing nature on a day-to-day basis. So far, only a handful of longitudinal studies exist in this field of research. We used daily-diary data of the study Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) III and employed multilevel regression to separate within-person effects from between-person associations, based on a relatively large sample (n>1,100 respondents, N>8,700 observations). This allowed us to systematically explore differences and similarities between state and trait measures of well-being in connection with nature experience, which has been little studied to date. The results show that everyday nature enjoyment increase within-person affect balance to a similar extent as other positive experiences that were mainly of a social nature, and that nature enjoyment counteracts stressors and health symptoms. Moreover, our findings support the idea that individuals employ “environmental strategies” by using everyday nature enjoyment for motivational and affect regulation. Eventual effect-moderation through socio-economic and demographic characteristics was explicitly tested. Very small coefficients, which were not significant, supported our expectation that the positive influence of nature enjoyment on within-person affect balance remains stable across population groups. The findings support the Stress Reduction Theory and the Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development.

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 Presented in Session 110. Geography, Environment and the Role of Place in Health