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Happiness is Greater in More Scenic Locations.


ABSTRACT: Does spending time in beautiful settings boost people's happiness? The answer to this question has long remained elusive due to a paucity of large-scale data on environmental aesthetics and individual happiness. Here, we draw on two novel datasets: first, individual happiness data from the smartphone app, Mappiness, and second, crowdsourced ratings of the "scenicness" of photographs taken across England from the online game Scenic-Or-Not. We find that individuals are happier in more scenic locations, even when we account for a range of factors such as the activity the individual was engaged in at the time, weather conditions and the income of local inhabitants. Crucially, this relationship holds not only in natural environments, but in built-up areas too, even after controlling for the presence of green space. Our results provide evidence that the aesthetics of the environments that policymakers choose to build or demolish may have consequences for our everyday wellbeing.

SUBMITTER: Seresinhe CI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6418136 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Happiness is Greater in More Scenic Locations.

Seresinhe Chanuki Illushka CI   Preis Tobias T   MacKerron George G   Moat Helen Susannah HS  

Scientific reports 20190314 1


Does spending time in beautiful settings boost people's happiness? The answer to this question has long remained elusive due to a paucity of large-scale data on environmental aesthetics and individual happiness. Here, we draw on two novel datasets: first, individual happiness data from the smartphone app, Mappiness, and second, crowdsourced ratings of the "scenicness" of photographs taken across England from the online game Scenic-Or-Not. We find that individuals are happier in more scenic locat  ...[more]

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