Birdwatching helps reduce distress and improve mental health in students: Research | Health

Bird watching may be an option for college students looking to improve their mental health. Recent research shows that people who have nature-based experiences report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of psychological discomfort than those who don’t. Birdwatching in particular produced encouraging effects, with greater increases in subjective well-being and greater reductions in distress than more general nature exposure such as walking. Because birdwatching is a simple sport, this finding is positive for college students, who are most likely to have mental health problems.

“There’s a lot of research on the benefits of well-being through the pandemic, suggesting that young adults and college-age children are struggling the most,” said the study’s corresponding author, University of North Carolina Forestry and Environment Research Institute. said resource professor Nils Peterson. Carolina State University. “If you think about students and graduate students in particular, they seem to be a group that is struggling in terms of accessing and benefiting from nature.

“Birdwatching is one of the most common ways humans interact with wildlife, and college campuses provide an accessible place for this activity in urban areas.”

To quantitatively measure subjective well-being, researchers used a five-question survey known as the World Health Organization’s Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). The tool asks participants to assign a rating from 0 to 5 to statements about happiness, depending on how often they have felt that way in the past two weeks. For example, if given the prompt “I felt calm and relaxed,” participants would mark 0 for “never” and 5 for “always.” Researchers can calculate a raw happiness score by simply adding up the five responses. Zero is the worst possible quality of life and 25 is the best possible quality of life.

The researchers divided the participants into three groups: a control group, a group assigned five nature walks, and a group assigned five 30-minute birdwatching sessions. All three groups improved their WHO-5 scores, but the birdwatching group started lower and ended higher than his other two groups. Using the STOP-D, a similar questionnaire designed to measure psychological distress, researchers found that participants on both birdwatching and nature walks showed decreased distress, while engagement in nature showed a decrease in distress. They also found that it performed better than the

This study differs from some previous studies in that it compared the effects of birdwatching and interaction with nature to a control group rather than to a group more actively experiencing negative conditions. said Peterson.

“One of the studies we reviewed in the paper compared people who listen to birds to people who listen to traffic, but that’s not really a neutral comparison,” Peterson said. Ta. “We had a neutral control to leave people alone and compare it to something positive.” This supports the idea of ​​paving the way for For example, future research could examine why birdwatching helps people feel better, or the moderating effects of race, gender, and other factors.

The paper, “Birdwatching is associated with improved psychological well-being on college campuses: A pilot-scale experimental study,” is published in the journal Environment Psychology. Co-authors include Lincoln Larson, Aaron Hipp, Justin M. Beal, Katherine LeRose, Hannah Desrochers, Summer Lauder, Sophia Torres, Nathan A. Tarr, Kayla Stokes, Katherine Stevenson, and Katherine・Includes L. Martin, all from North Carolina. (Ani)

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