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. 2020 Nov 17;17(22):8519.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17228519.

Feeling Stressed and Ugly? Leave the City and Visit Nature! An Experiment on Self-and Other-Perceived Stress and Attractiveness Levels

Claudia Menzel, Fiona Dennenmoser, Gerhard Reese  1
Affiliations

Feeling Stressed and Ugly? Leave the City and Visit Nature! An Experiment on Self-and Other-Perceived Stress and Attractiveness Levels

Claudia Menzel et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Natural environments, compared to urban environments, usually lead to reduced stress and positive body appreciation. We assumed that walks through nature and urban environments affect self- and other-perceived stress and attractiveness levels. Therefore, we collected questionnaire data and took photographs of male participants' faces before and after they took walks. In a second step, female participants rated the photographs. As expected, participants felt more restored and attractive, and less stressed after they walked in nature compared to an urban environment. A significant interaction of environment (nature, urban) and time (pre, post) indicated that the men were rated by the women as being more stressed after the urban walk. Other-rated attractiveness levels, however, were similar for both walks and time points. In sum, we showed that the rather stressful experience of a short-term urban walk mirrors in the face of men and is detectable by women.

Keywords: attractiveness; face perception; natural environment; stress; urban environment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no competing interests. The reported study was conducted in the scope of FD’s Master thesis, which was submitted to and reviewed by the Institute of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overview of study design and procedure.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Representative images of the walking routes through nature (A–C) and urban (D–F) environments. © The authors.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Example picture to represent photographs taken of each walker in an original (A) and cropped version (B). The latter was used for the ratings. For reasons of data protection, no photograph of a walker is shown here, but of one of the authors (FD) agreed to have her picture published here. Cropping, lighting, and camera settings correspond to those of the walkers. © The authors.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Results of self- (A,B) and other-rated (C,D) stress and attractiveness before and after urban and nature walks with indication of significance for post-hoc tests. See main text for statistical parameters of the main effects and interactions from the respective 2 × 2 ANOVAs. Note. * p < 0.05, + p = 0.058.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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