Associations of Nature Contact with Emotional Ill-Being and Well-Being: The Role of Emotion Regulation

While walking in the park, you might notice how being in nature makes you feel good. Going outside may help you feel calmer, less anxious, and more connected with your community. What you may not know is there is a lot of research that backs up these feelings. In this study led by Gregory Bratman, PhD, researchers looked at how spending time in nature supports emotional well-being.

The study examined how people manage and respond to emotional situations (emotion regulation). Let’s say you get a bad grade on a test. To manage the difficult feelings (i.e., cool down), you could go on a walk in the park with a friend. This choice is emotion regulation, and it helps shift how you feel. Everyone uses emotion regulation in some way, even if we don’t realize we’re practicing it. This paper focused on three forms of emotion regulation:

1. Rumination: thinking deeply about an experience or emotion, often with little positive results.
2. Distraction: shifting attention away from what you are thinking or doing to another unrelated thing. Can be positive (adaptive distraction) or negative (maladaptive distraction).
3. Reappraisal: examining something again or differently. Reappraisal can help us better cope with stress, improving our well-being.

Spending time in nature changes the types of emotion regulation people use. This paper explores how nature contact and well-being is shaped by different forms of emotion regulation. Results from an online 600-person survey suggested:

• People who spent more time in nature showed improved well-being and more use of reappraisal.
• People who spent less time in nature showed worsened ill-being and more use of distraction and rumination.
• The positive impacts of time spent in nature level out after a certain number of hours outside.

The study results did not focus on variables of race and ethnicity. More research should explore these impacts. There are many unknowns about how nature affects our emotional state. The results of increased reappraisal and well-being support emotion regulation playing a role.

Abstract

Nature contact has associations with emotional ill-being and well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We hypothesised that increased adaptive and decreased maladaptive emotion regulation strategies would be a pathway linking nature contact to ill-being and well-being. Using data from a survey of 600 U.S.-based adults administered online in 2022, we conducted structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. We found that:

1. Frequency of nature contact was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional well-being,
2. Effective emotion regulation was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional well-being, and
3. The associations of higher frequency of nature contact with these benefits were partly explained via emotion regulation.

Moreover, we found a nonlinear relationship for the associations of duration of nature contact with some outcomes, with a rise in benefits up to certain amounts of time, and a levelling off after these points. These findings support and extend previous work that demonstrates that the associations of nature contact with emotional ill-being and well-being may be partly explained by changes in emotion regulation.