Green Spaces with Fewer People Improve Self-Reported Affective Experience and Mood
Date
2023
Authors
Honey-Rosés, Jordi
Zapata, Oscar
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MDPI
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Article
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Abstract
Calm and quiet green spaces provide health benefits for urban residents. Yet as cities become more densely populated, increasing public users to green spaces may reduce or moderate these benefits. We examine how increased pedestrian density in a green street changes self-reported wellbeing. We use a between subject experimental design that added public users as confederates in randomly selected periods over three weeks. We collect data on mood and affective response from pedestrians moving through the green street (n = 504), with and without our public user treatment in randomly selected periods. Mood and affective response are improved when experiencing the green street with fewer people. We find that an increased number of public users in the green space has a negative effect on mood, especially among women. We provide experimental evidence that self-reported wellbeing in urban green spaces depends on social context, and that there are gender inequities associated with changes in affective response. Although we only measure immediate impacts, our results imply that the health benefits of green spaces may be limited by the total number of users. This research contributes additional evidence that greener cities are also healthier cities, but that the benefits may not be equally shared between women and men and will depend on the social context of use.
Description
© 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Keywords
affective response, field experiment, experiment, gender, green street, green space, mood, stress, wellbeing, public space
Citation
Honey-Rosés, J.; Zapata, O. Green Spaces with Fewer People Improve Self-Reported Affective Experience and Mood. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20, 1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph20021219
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Citation
Honey-Rosés, J.; Zapata, O. Green Spaces with Fewer People Improve Self-Reported Affective Experience and Mood. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20, 1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph20021219
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DOI
10.3390/ ijerph20021219