Tomasso Linda Powers, Spengler John D, Catalano Paul J, Chen Jarvis T, Laurent Jose Guillermo Cedeño
Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 401 Park Dr, Boston, MA 02215, United States.
Population Health Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, United States.
Urban For Urban Green. 2023 Aug;86. doi: 10.1016/j.ufug.2023.128005. Epub 2023 Jun 17.
Prescribed nature walks frequently yield improvements to mood and cognition as observed in experimental studies. Research that uses real life settings such as self-determined time exercising outdoors for restorative health benefits may more accurately elicit effects than time-specified study protocols. This study examined in situ psycho-cognitive outcomes of routine walks in urban greenspace to test the concept that self-set exposure duration and not context alone is related to magnitude of psycho-cognitive benefit. Pre-post measurements taken on a diverse participant pool of individuals walking in urban parks and recruited on random days over a two-week period found significant associations between outdoor activity duration and cognitive and mood improvements. Greater outdoor walking duration linearly predicted stronger processing speeds but non-linearly in tests of other cognitive domains. Results of fixed effects model for mean mood change following green exercise show outdoor walking influenced mood change at highest levels of significance, even after accounting for individual level variability in duration. Mood improved for all durations of outdoor walking under a random effects model with high significance. Untethering fixed intervals of outdoor exercise from formal study design revealed briefer but more frequent nature engagement aligned with nature affinity. The influence of unmeasured factors, e.g., nature affinity or restorative conditioning, for prescriptive durations of urban green exercise merits further investigation toward designing wellbeing interventions directed at specific urban populations.
如实验研究中所观察到的，规定的自然漫步常常能改善情绪和认知。使用现实生活场景的研究，比如自主决定在户外锻炼以获得恢复性健康益处，可能比规定时间的研究方案更准确地得出效果。本研究考察了城市绿地中日常散步的现场心理认知结果，以检验这样一个概念：自我设定的暴露时长而非仅仅是环境与心理认知益处的大小相关。在为期两周的时间里，在城市公园中随机招募不同的参与者进行前后测量，结果发现户外活动时长与认知和情绪改善之间存在显著关联。更长的户外步行时长线性地预测了更快的处理速度，但在其他认知领域的测试中则是非线性的。绿色运动后平均情绪变化的固定效应模型结果显示，即使在考虑了时长的个体水平差异后，户外散步对情绪变化的影响仍具有最高的显著性。在随机效应模型下，所有户外步行时长的情绪都有显著改善。将户外锻炼的固定时间从正式研究设计中解放出来，发现更短但更频繁地接触自然与自然亲和力相关。对于城市绿色运动规定时长而言，未测量因素（如自然亲和力或恢复性调节）的影响，值得进一步研究，以设计针对特定城市人群的健康干预措施。
