Emotion Regulation and Virtual Nature: Cognitive Reappraisal as an Individual-Level Moderator for Impacts on Subjective Vitality

Citation

Theodorou, A., Spano., G., Bratman, G.N., Monneron, K., Sanesi, G., Carrus, G., Imperatori, C., Panno, A. (2023). Emotion regulation and virtual nature: Cognitive reappraisal as an individual-level moderator for impacts on subjective vitality. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 5028. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30287-7

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Can a quick vr nature break boost your energy? It depends on how you handle emotions.

Some people are naturally better at reframing their emotions. This skill is called cognitive reappraisal. Instead of getting stuck on a negative thought, they might tell themselves, “This is a challenge, not a threat,” or “What can I learn from this?” New research suggests this habit might also make people more sensitive to the emotional cues in natural environments, helping them get a bigger energy boost from virtual nature experiences.

To test this idea, researchers showed 187 university students a series of 360-degree panoramic photos using a VR headset. Each student viewed four scenes from one of four environments: a national park, a lakeside setting, an Arctic landscape, or an urban cityscape. Afterward, the students reported how energized and alive they felt. This measure is called subjective vitality.

The results revealed something important: not everyone responded to virtual nature the same way. For people who rarely used cognitive reappraisal, viewing nature scenes (compared to city scenes) didn’t do much for their energy levels. But for those who regularly used this emotion-regulation strategy, the virtual nature experience gave them a noticeable vitality boost, especially when viewing lakeside and Arctic environments.

These findings suggest that virtual nature experiences could be even more powerful if paired with training that helps people build their cognitive reappraisal skills. They also highlight a key takeaway: when it comes to reaping the benefits of virtual nature, individual differences matter.

Abstract

Figure 1. Graphical representation of the simple slope analysis. CR cognitive reappraisal.

People who make habitual use of an emotion regulation strategy such as cognitive reappraisal may be more sensitive to the emotion cues coming from a surrounding natural environment and, thus, get more benefits from virtual nature exposure such as enhanced subjective vitality. However, no previous study investigated the moderating role of cognitive reappraisal in the relationship between exposure to different types of natural environments (a national park, a lacustrine environment, and an arctic environment vs. an urban environment) and subjective vitality. We designed a between-subject design (four conditions, one per type of environment) with a sample of 187 university students (Mage = 21.17, SD = 2.55). Participants were exposed to four 360° panoramic photos of the environment for one minute each with a virtual reality head-mounted display. The results of a multicategorical moderation analysis attested that there were two significant interactions, respectively between lacustrine and arctic environments and cognitive reappraisal. More specifically, for participants with low levels of habitual use of cognitive reappraisal, the effects of virtual nature (vs. urban) exposure on subjective vitality were not significant, while for participants with high levels, the effects were significant and positive. Findings show how the potential of virtual nature may be boosted with training aimed at increasing the general use of cognitive reappraisal, supports enhancing the applications of virtual nature, and demonstrates the need to take individual differences into account when determining the benefits of these applications.