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Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation
Open accessAbstract
Significance: More than 50% of people now live in urban areas. By 2050 this proportion will be 70%. Urbanization is associated with increased levels of mental illness, but it’s not yet clear why. Through a controlled experiment, we investigated whether nature experience would influence rumination (repetitive thought focused on negative aspects of the self), a known risk factor for mental illness. Participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world.
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“The fact that both the forest and roadside walks started from the same location, the parking lot of the Forest Preserve, and the fact that the roadside walk took place on a suburban roadside, may also explain why the differences between the psychological outcomes for roadside and forest walk were attenuated as compared to other studies [46,47,48,59].”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“Although the health benefits of exercise and exposure to nature are well established, most evidence of their interaction comes from acute observations of single sessions of activity.”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“Bratman et al. similarly found that a 90 min walk in a forest led to reductions in rumination (i.e., the process of continuously thinking the same thoughts repeatedly, which is generally associated with anxiety and depression) and decreases in neural activity in brain regions associated with rumination [47].”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“The studies of Berman et al., [46] Bratman et al., [47] and Park et al. [48] compared forested to urban areas with limited or no exposure to greenspace, which may have provided a greater contrast of environments than our locations.”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“We suggest tentative psychological mechanisms to explain how the restorative qualities of green spaces might lead to increased mindfulness and interrupted rumination (Bratman et al., 2015).”
From Exploring the role of exposure to green and blue spaces in preventing anxiety and depression among young people aged 14–24 years living in urban settings: A systematic review and conceptual framework (2022) · cites this paper as Bratman et al., 2015
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“Children in high-income countries are now experiencing significantly lower levels of contact with nature, or GT, than previous generations [35, 36].”
From Psychological impacts of “screen time” and “green time” for children and adolescents: A systematic scoping review (2020) · cites this paper as [35]
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“The walks taken on days 8 and 22 are the first walks that each participant took in each location and thereby provided the most direct comparison to prior studies [46,47,48].”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“The protocol for Walking Green imposes a significant participant burden as compared to prior studies in three ways [46,47,48]. First multiple psychological and physiological outcomes were assessed before and after each walk. Second, the entire study lasted 29 days and required nine visits to the laboratory. Finally, participants spent as much as 3.5 hours per day engaged in the study.”
From Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Laureate Institute for Brain Research (US)
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (SE)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2015-06-29
- Volume
- 112
- Issue
- 28
- Pages
- 8567-8572
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC4507237
- OpenAlex
- W2120527047
- Cited by
- 932
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 118 · 2025: 124 · 2024: 117 · 2023: 88 · 2022: 90 · 2021: 81 · 2020: 71 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 62 · 2017: 48 · 2016: 39 · 2015: 13
- FWCI
- 33.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Winslow Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban Green Space and Health
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
- Keywords
- nature experience, rumination, subgenual prefrontal cortex, depression, urbanization, mental illness, nature exposure, urban mental health, psychological well-being
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Female, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Thinking, Walking, Prefrontal Cortex
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