Jillian Bowman

School: The University of Chicago

Major: Psychology

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tzcv-gj06

Jillian Bowman is a graduate of The University of Chicago in the Class of 2020 where she was a Pre-Med student who majored in Psychology. Throughout her college career, she worked on both clinical and cognitive psychology research. She began working in Dr. Marc Berman’s Environmental Neuroscience Lab in June of 2018, and since then she has worked on many projects investigating the interplay between natural and urban environments and the mind. After graduating from the University of Chicago, she will take one gap year before attending medical school. She hopes to study public health and pursue a pediatric subspecialty. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, baking, and going to concerts!

A Walk in the Park or a Day at the Mall: The Effects of the Environment on Affect and Impulsivity

Abstract

The external physical environment has been shown to have tangible effects on our health, cognitive abilities, and our emotions.3,9,13 Exposure to nature tends to have salutatory, or beneficial, effects on cognitive performance, while exposure to urban environments does not usually carry these same benefits.3,4,9 This study examined the connections between the environment and emotions. It is likely that a variety of factors influence the strength of the relationship between the environment and emotion, and the current study investigated one of these factors. The factor investigated here was impulsivity, a measure that describes a person’s desire for immediate rewards and general likelihood of acting impulsively. A sample of 101 adults, aged 18 to 39, were taken to two different indoor environments, one urban and one natural. They completed a baseline survey in the lab, and three self-assessment surveys while walking in the two environments, all asking participants to rate to what extent certain adjectives described their current emotional state and impulsivity. The data was analyzed using R. It was hypothesized that spending time in nature would increase the positive affect scores of the participants. This study replicated previously obtained results, demonstrating that time spent in natural environments led to large increases in positive affect, and a very slight decrease in negative affect. Participants’ trait impulsivity was shown to be unrelated to the difference in their emotion scores across conditions, and only weakly correlated to their state impulsivity in each environmental condition. These results have the potential to be applied in public health frameworks and will add to the expanding knowledge base regarding the interplay of the environment and the mind.