Does increasing biodiversity in an urban woodland setting promote positive emotional responses in humans? A stress recovery experiment using 360-degree videos of an urban woodland

RESEARCH ARTICLE Does increasing biodiversity in an urban woodland setting promote positive emotional responses in humans? A stress recovery experiment using 360-degree videos of an urban woodland Simone FarrisID1*, Nicola Dempsey1, Kirsten McEwan2, Helen Hoyle1, Ross Cameron1 1 Department of Landscape Architecture, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 2 College of Health, Psychology and Social Care, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom * sfarris1@sheffield.ac.uk Abstract Green spaces can support human stress reduction and foster positive emotional well-being. Previous research has suggested that biodiversity (i.e. the variety of species of plants and animals in a given location) can enhance recovery from stress even further. However, there is limited experimental evidence testing this hypothesis and results, to date, have been mixed. This study aimed to provide further understanding of the role of biodiversity (actual or perceived) on human well-being by experimentally manipulating species richness and stress. Participants (372 in total) took part in an online experiment, where they received an episode of mild stress before watching a 360-degree video to recover. The video showed the same location, an urban woodland, but at one of four artificially manipulated levels of bio- diversity. The participants reported their Positive and Negative Affect before and after the stress induction and after watching the video, providing a measure of their stress and well-

being throughout the experiment. Participants also reported their perceptions of biodiversity (i.e. how diverse they thought the location was) and elaborated on their responses with brief comments. Repeated Measure Analysis of Variance revealed that exposure to all levels of biodiversity reduced the participants’ Negative Affect, but with no significant difference between the conditions. However, the analysis showed higher Positive Affect in those partic- ipants who perceived the environment as more biodiverse. Comments from participants indicated that those who reported noticing flowers and trees in the environment also showed higher Positive Affect. This suggests that perceiving biodiversity promotes more positive emotions, but critically one needs to actually notice (engage with) the components of biodi- versity to elicit these extra benefits. Introduction Urban green space has been cited as providing some degree of protection against poor mental health [1–3] and providing recovery opportunities for individuals suffering from mental health PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297179 February 7, 2024 1 / 20 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Farris S, Dempsey N, McEwan K, Hoyle H, Cameron R (2024) Does increasing biodiversity in an urban woodland setting promote positive emotional responses in humans? A stress recovery experiment using 360-degree videos of an urban woodland. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0297179. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297179 Editor: Tunira Bhadauria, Feroze Gandhi Degree

College, INDIA Received: April 3, 2023 Accepted: December 30, 2023 Published: February 7, 2024 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297179 Copyright: © 2024 Farris et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The dataset file is available from the UK Data Service database URL: