Support Mental Restoration/Ease Stress

A literature review conducted by a Subiza-Perez-lead team confirms that contact with natural environments is mentally refreshing.  Investigators state that “Almost four decades ago, Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Recovery Theory postulated that nature could help people to recover from the attentional fatigue and the emotional negative outcomes coming from their daily performance. . . . This paper presents a descriptive review of 19 restoration pretest-posttest field studies. . . . there is a reasonable amount of evidence supporting the main premises of ART and SRT.

Wood and colleagues explored how the species in a space influence mental refreshment.  The team found that “there is very good reason to expect that variations in ecological ‘quality’ (number of species, integrity of ecological processes) may influence the link between access to green space and benefits to human health and well-being. We test the relationship between green space quality and restorative benefit in an inner city urban population in Bradford, United Kingdom. We selected 12 urban parks for study where we carried out botanical and faunal surveys to quantify biodiversity. . . .