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Feeling at Home in the Wilderness: Environmental Conditions, Well-Being and Aesthetic Experience.

ABSTRACT: Environmental conditions affect one's aesthetic experience in natural environments. Understanding that effect requires accounting for the conditions affecting one's attention and experience. Rather than attempt to reduce and control environmental factors, we compare two similar groups during naturally occurring, intense and overwhelming conditions and examine the relationship between common characteristics as well as environment and group differences. Participants undertook a 5-day, winter, wilderness adventure training course designed to challenge their considerable wilderness and leadership skills under two different extreme weather conditions but within the same wilderness area (n = 47 full participation). In addition to pre- and post-adventure questionnaires, participants responded daily during the wilderness experience to briefly describe a self-selected, strong experience of nature; characterize its associated feeling states; and answer questions probing eight aesthetic aspects of the experience. Participant strong experience of nature related to hedonic and eudaimonic feelings in different ways depending upon environmental conditions. In particular, strong correlations occurred between agreement ratings with "I felt at home in nature" daily experience reports and satisfaction with life and personal growth trait measures, but primarily during sunny and cold conditions on a high plateau (PG: Pearson r = 0.51; SWL: r = 0.70) and not significantly in stormy and wet weather in a mountain forest. In addition, experience narratives that correspond to strongest agreement to feeling at home in nature were examined for shared themes and synthesized into six dimensions: focus on sensory experiences at a particular moment, self-reflection, wonder, appreciation of beauty, positive emotions, and insight of relation to nature. These findings actualize the notion of wonder, aroused by sudden feelings or by reflection, as a salient ingredient in feeling at home in wilderness. The finding of feeling at home in nature, as the most important feature relating to feelings and well-being, is discussed in relation to self-awareness, philosophical thinking, and potential ethical awareness.

SUBMITTER: Lovoll HS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7082929 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Feeling at Home in the Wilderness: Environmental Conditions, Well-Being and Aesthetic Experience.

Løvoll Helga Synnevåg HS Sæther Knut-Willy KW Graves Mark M

Frontiers in psychology 20200313

Environmental conditions affect one's aesthetic experience in natural environments. Understanding that effect requires accounting for the conditions affecting one's attention and experience. Rather than attempt to reduce and control environmental factors, we compare two similar groups during naturally occurring, intense and overwhelming conditions and examine the relationship between common characteristics as well as environment and group differences. Participants undertook a 5-day, winter, wild ...[more]

PMID: 32231621

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Project description:Background: Environmental volunteering can increase well-being, but environmental volunteer well-being has rarely been compared to participant well-being associated with other types of volunteering or nature-based activities. This paper aims to use a multidimensional approach to well-being to explore the immediately experienced and later remembered well-being of environmental volunteers and to compare this to the increased well-being of participants in other types of nature-based activities and volunteering. Furthermore, it aims to compare volunteer managers' perceptions of their volunteers' well-being with the self-reported well-being of the volunteers. Methods: Onsite surveys were conducted of practical conservation and biodiversity monitoring volunteers, as well as their control groups (walkers and fieldwork students, respectively), to measure general well-being before their nature-based activity and activity-related well-being immediately after their activity. Online surveys of current, former and potential volunteers and volunteer managers measured remembered volunteering-related well-being and managers' perceptions of their volunteers' well-being. Data were analysed based on Seligman's multidimensional PERMA ('positive emotion', 'engagement', 'positive relationship', 'meaning', 'achievement') model of well-being. Factor analysis recovered three of the five PERMA elements, 'engagement', 'relationship' and 'meaning', as well as 'negative emotion' and 'health' as factors. Results: Environmental volunteering significantly improved positive elements and significantly decreased negative elements of participants' immediate well-being, and it did so more than walking or student fieldwork. Even remembering their volunteering up to six months later, volunteers rated their volunteering-related well-being higher than volunteers rated their well-being generally in life. However, volunteering was not found to have an effect on overall mean well-being generally in life. Volunteer managers did not perceive the significant increase in well-being that volunteers reported. Conclusions: This study showed how environmental volunteering immediately improved participants' well-being, even more than other nature-based activities. It highlights the benefit of regarding well-being as a multidimensional construct to more systematically understand, support and enhance volunteer well-being.

Project description:BackgroundResidential moves (displacement) owing to climate- and weather-related disasters may significantly impact mental health. Despite the growing risk from climate change, health impacts of environmental-mobility remain understudied.ObjectivesWe assessed the effects of displacement on the association between landslides and changes in perceived mental well-being in Banjarnegara, Indonesia. We also investigated whether sociodemographics (age, sex, level of education, household-level income, or employment in agriculture) and landslide characteristics (number and severity of landslides) were associated with differing odds of relocation after experiencing landslides.MethodsIn this cross-sectional study, we surveyed 420 individuals who experienced landslides between 2014 and 2018 to assess perceived changes in mental well-being, comparing after landslide exposure to before landslide exposure. We used a novel six-item measure that was created in collaboration with the local community to compare perceived changes between those who were displaced by landslides and those who were not displaced, using logistic and multinomial regressions adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics. We then assessed whether the odds of displacement differed based on sociodemographic characteristics and landslide exposure characteristics, using logistic regressions.ResultsThose who were displaced were more likely than those who were not displaced to report perceived increases in economic stability [odds ratio (OR)=3.06; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.45, 6.46], optimism (OR=4.01; 95% CI: 1.87, 8.61), safety (OR=2.71; 95% CI: 1.44, 5.10), religiosity (OR=1.92; 95% CI: 1.03, 3.65), and closeness with community (OR=1.90; 95% CI: 1.10, 3.33) after landslides compared with before their first landslide during the study period. More frequent landslide exposures were associated with reduced odds of relocation, but more severe landslides were associated with increased odds of relocation.DiscussionThese findings suggest that landslides affect the mental well-being not only of those who are displaced but also of those who are left behind. Further, this work supports the need for community-based participatory research to fully capture the health impacts of environmental mobility. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP9391.

Project description:Human well-being is often an overarching goal in environmental decision-making, yet assessments are often limited to economic, health, or ecological endpoints that are more tangible to measure. Composite indices provide a comprehensive approach to measuring well-being in terms of multi-dimensional components, such as living standards, health, education, safety, and culture. For example, the Human Well-Being Index (HWBI) framework, initially developed for the U.S. fifty states, was recently applied to quantify human well-being for Puerto Rico. However, the paucity of data at spatial scales finer than state or county levels, particularly for social metrics, poses a major limitation to quantifying well-being at neighborhood-scales relevant to decision-making. Here we demonstrate a spatial interpolation method to fill in missing fine-scale data where coarser-scale data is available. Downscaling from municipio (i.e., county-equivalent) to census-tract revealed a greater range of variability in well-being scores across Puerto Rico, in particular, a larger proportion of low well-being scores. Furthermore, while some components of wellbeing (e.g., Education, Health, Leisure Time, Safety and Security, Social Cohesion) showed consistent improvement over time from 2000-2017 across Puerto Rico, others (e.g., Connection to Nature, Cultural Fulfillment, Living Standards) were variable among census tracts, increasing for some but declining for others. We use a case study in the San Juan Bay estuary watershed to illustrate how approaches to quantify baseline levels of well-being can be used to explore potential impacts of management actions on communities, including to identify environmental justice inequalities among neighborhoods. Spatial clustering analysis was used to identify statistically significant cold or hot spots in well-being. This study demonstrates how indicators of well-being, coupled with interpolation methods to overcome limitations of data availability, can help to monitor long-term changes over time and to better communicate the potential value of ecosystem restoration or resource management.

Dataset Information

Feeling at Home in the Wilderness: Environmental Conditions, Well-Being and Aesthetic Experience.

Publications

Feeling at Home in the Wilderness: Environmental Conditions, Well-Being and Aesthetic Experience.

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