2022 / Health and well-being, Social media

The Relationship Between Natural Environments and Subjective Well-Being as Measured by Sentiment Expressed on Twitter

Citation

Lin, Y., Wood, S. A., & Lawler, J. J. (2022). The relationship between natural environments and subjective well-being as measured by sentiment expressed on Twitter. Landscape and Urban Planning, 227, 104539. doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2022.104539

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There’s growing evidence that spending time in nature can boost well-being. But actually measuring that connection is tricky.

To get a clearer picture, researchers turned to social media. They analyzed nearly 2 million geotagged tweets from more than 81,000 users in Seattle, Washington. By looking at the sentiment of each tweet — whether it was negative, neutral, or positive — and matching it to the environment where it was sent, they explored how nature affects mood.

The study focused on three features of the surroundings: the type of land cover (like parks, forests, or paved areas), the density of tree canopy, and the presence of urban parks. The researchers also accounted for the broader zoning of each location (residential, industrial, commercial, or mixed-use).

Their findings revealed some surprising patterns. In general, tweets sent from natural areas were less likely to be negative than those sent from built-up urban spaces. In industrial zones, more tree cover was linked to fewer negative tweets and more positive ones. But in commercial and mixed-use zones, the opposite was true — more trees actually seemed to be associated with less positive sentiment.

Urban parks were mostly linked to fewer negative tweets. However, large natural parks in residential areas were actually associated with fewer positive tweets.

The takeaway? The relationship between nature and well-being is more complicated than it first appears. It depends heavily on context — specifically, the kind of built environment someone is in. By digging into geotagged social media data, this study offers urban planners and land managers a more nuanced understanding of how green spaces truly affect people’s moods, which could help shape better cities.

Abstract

Fig. 1. (A) The spatial distribution of tweets in the sample. (B) Land cover in Seattle. (C) Tree canopy coverage in Seattle. (D) Parks in Seattle. Land-cover and tree-canopy data were taken from the 2016 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) (Dewitz, 2019). Polygons representing urban parks within Seattle were downloaded from Seattle GeoData portal (Seattle Parks, 2012).

There is growing evidence that time spent in nature can affect well-being. Nonetheless, assessing this relationship can be difficult. We used 1,971,045 geolocated tweets sent by 81,140 users from Seattle, Washington, USA to advance our understanding of the relationship between subjective well-being and natural environments. Specifically, we quantified the relationships between sentiment (negative/neutral/positive) expressed in geolocated tweets and their surrounding environments, focusing on three environmental indicators: land-cover type, tree-canopy density, and urban parks. We allowed the relationships to vary according to the broader type of environment (i.e., land-use zoning). We estimated three random-intercept partial proportional odds models corresponding to the three environmental indicators while controlling for multiple covariates. Our results suggested that for a given land-use type, tweets sent from some natural land-cover types were less likely to be negative compared to tweets sent from the urban built land-cover type. For tweets sent in industrial zones, an increase in tree-canopy cover was associated with a lower probability of having negative sentiments and with a higher probability of having positive sentiments; but for tweets sent in commercial/mixed zones, the association was reversed. Also, urban parks were generally associated with a lower probability of having negative sentiments, but tweets sent from large natural parks in residential zones were less likely to be positive. Our results suggest that the relationship between subjective well-being and natural environments depends on where people are situated in the built environment and may be more complex than previously thought. The more nuanced understanding provided by analyzing geolocated social media has potential to inform urban planning and land management.