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Strolling in a park can enhance your temper as a lot as Christmas, examine claims

The increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature corresponds to the increase in mood at Christmas, claims a new study

Couple walking in the park together

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Christmas is often described as the happiest time of the year, but new study suggests that a walk in a park can be just as good for your mood.

Researchers found that the greener the green space, the happier and less self-centered people are.

The first study of its kind showed that visitors to urban parks use happier words on Twitter and express less negativity than they did before they visited.

The researchers also found that their upbeat mood lasted for up to four hours afterwards – “like a glow”.

The effect is so strong that the increase in happiness from visiting an outpost of urban nature corresponds to the increase in mood at Christmas, by far the happiest day of the year on Twitter.

As more people live in cities and the rate of mood disorders increases, the research team said their findings could have a powerful impact on public health and urban planning.

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont in the United States examined hundreds of tweets a day posted by people in 160 parks in San Francisco.

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Aaron Schwartz, a PhD student who led the research, said, “We found that people are happier on all of the tweets in parks.

“But the effect was stronger in large regional parks with extensive tree cover and vegetation.”

He said smaller neighborhood parks showed smaller increases in positive sentiment, and mostly paved citizen squares and plazas showed the smallest increase in sentiment.

Mr Schwartz said the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the greatest impact, and one of the words that shows the biggest surge in tweets from parks is “flowers.”

Co-author Professor Taylor Ricketts said, “In cities, large green spaces are very important to people’s wellbeing.

“We are seeing increasing evidence that it is central to promoting mental health.

“A big focus in conservation has been on monetary benefits – such as: How many dollars in flood damage did we avoid by restoring a wetland?

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“But this study is part of a new wave of research that goes beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct health benefits of nature.

“Even more innovative here is our focus on the benefits of mental health – which so far have really been underestimated and insufficiently researched.”

The new study relied on a hedonometer – an instrument that uses a body of approximately 10,000 common words that were assessed by a large pool of volunteers.

They ranked words they thought were the happiest at the top from one to nine, with sad words at the bottom.

As an average of the volunteers’ answers, each word received a score: “happy” itself was rated 8.30, “hahaha” with 7.94 and “parks” with 7.14.

Neutral words – “and” and “der” – were rated 5.22 and 4.98, respectively. Below “caught” 3.08, “crash” 2.60 and “prison” 1.76. “Flowers” scored 7.56 points.

Enjoy a summer picnic together
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Using the scores, the team collects more than 50 million tweets from around the world every day before calculating the average happiness score.

For the study, the team looked at tweets from 4,688 users who publicly disclosed their location in San Francisco.

This enabled the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks.

Co-author Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne said, “Working with the US Forest Service, we have developed some new techniques for mapping urban vegetation – with a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods.

“That really allowed us to get a thorough understanding of how the green and vegetation of these urban areas relates to the mood of the people there.”

Mr Schwartz said, “This is the first study that Twitter uses to look at how people’s moods change before, during, and after they visit different types of parking

“The greener parks show a bigger boost.”

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Overall, the tweets from the city parks in San Francisco were happier by a dramatic 0.23 points on the hedonometer scale above baseline.

Prof. Ricketts said, “This rise in sentiment is in line with that of Christmas Day for Twitter overall in the same year.”

Prof. Chris Danforth, a math professor in Vermont, said, “Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions that are not available in a store or downloaded on a screen.”

Prof. Danforth added, “Although we did not address causality in our study, we find that negative language – such as ‘don’t’, ‘no’, ‘can’t’, ‘can’t’ – has immediately decreased in the period after Visiting urban parks and providing specific language markers for the mood boost available outside. “

Conversely, he said the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns – “I” and “I” – decreases dramatically in Parks, possibly suggesting “a shift from the individual to the collective mental framework”.

The results were published in the journal People and Nature.

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