Fig 1.
Schematic of the research landscape of interactions between stress and nature exposure.
If the scale of the research (y-axis) and the condition of nature (x-axis) are considered, we suggest that this study addresses a gap in the current research landscape. The “non-degraded nature” column includes studies wherein the condition of “nature” is unspecified, and those in which participants perceive nature as non-degraded.
Fig 2.
Examples of the image pairs used in our conditions.
Table 1.
Means (and standard deviations) for cortisol concentrations pre-and post-intervention, for both conditions.
Table 2.
Analysis results. We conducted five analyses—the entire sample, then four split-sample groups that comprised only the low- and high-scoring participants for connectedness to nature and climate anxiety (i.e., participants who scored below one SD below the mean, or above one SD above the mean; see methods for details).
For each analysis, the table shows: mean percent change in cortisol levels (pre-post intervention); standard deviations of those means; statistically estimated difference between the means for the two conditions; and lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval of the difference between the means by condition). Differences between conditions were not significant for the entire sample).