Research Center for Marketing and Consumer Science - Research Foundation Flanders, FWO, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2013 Jul 26;8(7):e65332. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065332. Print 2013.
In recent years, numerous environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that contact with nature as opposed to urban settings can improve an individual's mood, can lead to increased levels of vitality, and can offer an opportunity to recover from stress. According to Attention Restoration Theory (ART) the restorative potential of natural environments is situated in the fact that nature can replenish depleted attentional resources. This replenishment takes place, in part, because nature is deemed to be a source of fascination, with fascination being described as having an "attentional", an "affective" and an "effort" dimension. However, the claim that fascination with nature involves these three dimensions is to a large extent based on intuition or derived from introspection-based measurement methods, such as self-reports. In three studies, we aimed to more objectively assess whether these three dimensions indeed applied to experiences related to natural environments, before any (attentional) depletion has taken place. The instruments that were used were: (a) the affect misattribution procedure (Study 1), (b) the dot probe paradigm (Study 2) and (c) a cognitively effortful task (Study 3). These instrument were respectively aimed at verifying the affective, attentional and effort dimension of fascination. Overall, the results provide objective evidence for the claims made within the ART framework, that natural as opposed to urban settings are affectively positive (cfr., affective dimension) and that people have an attentional bias to natural (rather than urban) environments (cfr., attentional dimension). The results regarding the effort dimension are less straightforward, and suggest that this dimension only becomes important in sufficiently difficult cognitive tasks.
近年来，大量环境心理学研究表明，与城市环境相比，接触自然可以改善个体的情绪，提高活力水平，并为缓解压力提供机会。根据注意恢复理论（ART），自然环境的恢复潜力在于自然可以补充消耗的注意力资源。这种补充部分是因为自然被认为是吸引人的源泉，而吸引力被描述为具有“注意力”、“情感”和“努力”三个维度。然而，认为对自然的吸引力涉及这三个维度在很大程度上是基于直觉或源自内省的测量方法，如自我报告。在三项研究中，我们旨在更客观地评估在任何（注意力）消耗发生之前，这三个维度是否确实适用于与自然环境相关的体验。使用的仪器有：（a）情感归因程序（研究 1），（b）点探测范式（研究 2）和（c）认知费力任务（研究 3）。这些仪器分别旨在验证吸引力的情感、注意力和努力维度。总的来说，研究结果为 ART 框架内的主张提供了客观证据，即与城市环境相比，自然环境在情感上更为积极（参照情感维度），人们对自然（而不是城市）环境存在注意力偏向（参照注意力维度）。关于努力维度的结果则不那么直接，表明只有在足够困难的认知任务中，这一维度才变得重要。
