Give Yourself a Treat—Go Out to Nature (or at Least View Some Nature Pictures)


Exposure to nature is beneficial for human well-being. Contact with nature is good for both physical and mental health and is related to a higher level of happiness and lower levels of stress and anger.

In the last two years, the world has been facing the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, one of the common tools to contain transmission of the virus has been the implementation of stay-at-home restrictions and these are linked to increased anxiety and depression.

Would More Time With Nature Help?

Exposure to ongoing and uncontrolled stress affects immune processes, and influences susceptibility to and the course of disease. Therefore, developing individual resilience during such times is crucial. We thought contact with nature might help reduce stress and enhance individuals’ well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, but  stay-at-home restrictions have limited people’s ability to spend time outdoors.

Therefore, we studied four possible ways of having contact with real nature:

  • The presence of nature close to home
  • Nature viewed from the person’s window
  • Actually being in nature on the preceding day
  • Seeing images of nature

We included nature images because these have been extensively used in research on the restorative benefits of nature. Just observing nature images can serve as a type of therapy for people with accessibility limitations or barriers to real contact with nature.

Our survey was done in the last week of a five-week first lockdown in Israel. The stay-at-home orders restricted people to remain within 100 meters of home. Over 700 people answered questions about demographics, contact with nature, and emotional well-being measures. Also, some participants looked at nature images before completing the questionnaire, some examined urban images, and some completed the questionnaire without seeing any images. Below is one of the nature images we used (a walking path in a woods with flowers) and also one of the urban pictures (tall buildings with little greenery):

Image of walking path in nature

aerial view of city

How Does Nature Help? Let Us Count The Ways

Nature near home and nature viewed from the windows contributed to higher levels of well-being, and being in nature on the preceding day was associated with higher levels of positive affect. These benefits emerged even among those who had been economically hurt by the pandemic. Viewing nature images also impacted well-being, mainly by reducing stress and negative affect.

Furthermore, exposure to nature was more beneficial for women than for men. For positive affect, vitality, and stress, the difference between those who had nature near home and those who did not was higher for women than for men.

A visit to an urban park, a tree viewed from your window, or a walk in nature will do you good. If you can’t do those things, try nature videos on your TV!


For Further Reading

Mintz, K. K., Ayalon, O., Nathan, O., & Eshet, T. (2021). See or be? Contact with nature and well-being during COVID-19 lockdown. Journal of Environmental Psychology78,  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101714
 

Keren Kaplan Mintz is a researcher at Shamir Research Institute, and a faculty member at the Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences, Faculty of Education, the University of Haifa. She studies environmental psychology and environmental education.

Ofira Ayalon is a Professor at the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Haifa and a Senior Researcher, Head of Environment Cluster Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion, Haifa, Israel. Her interests are is related to environmental concerns and policy implications. 

 

Shared Life Experiences Can Bring People Closer but Might also Blind Us to Others’ Feelings

The notion “I know how you feel, I’ve been there too” is a common way to express that we understand another person’s feelings. In fact, having had the same experience as someone else is often seen as necessary to fully appreciate another person’s emotional experience. However, is this true? Is it actually helpful to “have been there too” in order to understand fully how someone else feels?

Most people believe the answer is yes. In a survey we conducted, we asked 400 Americans to predict whether people who had a similar experience in the past would be more accurate, less accurate, or not significantly different in understanding another person’s emotions. Most of the participants (80%) responded that shared experience promotes accuracy in understanding other people’s emotional states. This finding explains, for example, why some people, such as parents and therapists, believe that they should pursue similar experiences in order to have greater insight into how others, such as their children and clients, feel.  

To test whether this common belief is actually true, our research team at the University of Amsterdam developed a task that allowed us to test this belief. First, we collected a set of videos in which people spontaneously shared an authentic story about a negative emotional experience they went through, such as a cheating partner or a sick parent. We then asked each storyteller to rate the emotions they were feeling while telling their story. Later, other participants (the “perceivers”) were asked to watch the videos and rate how they thought the storyteller was feeling. Finally, they were asked whether they have ever had a life experience that was similar to the one the storyteller described.

Our question was whether the perceivers’ ratings of what the storyteller was feeling matched the storytellers’ actual emotional ratings. The higher the overlap between their ratings, the better perceivers understood what the storytellers were feeling.   

So, what did we find? Did shared life experiences foster more accurate insights into another’s life? In a series of studies involving 800 participants, we consistently found the opposite. That is, perceivers were less accurate in recognizing emotions when they had a similar negative experience as the storyteller. No kidding! You read it correctly—in fact, similarity in experience was related to lower accuracy. This counterintuitive finding clearly goes against the common belief and contradicted our own original hypothesis! We presumed that similarity in experience would allow people to consider more relevant information and that this first-hand familiarity with a similar situation would lead to a more accurate understanding of the other person’s emotions. But it turns out this isn’t the case.

Although “I know how you feel, I’ve been there too” is a common way to express understanding of another’s feelings, it may not actually be helpful to “have been there too” in order to understand how someone else feels. In fact, first-hand experience with a similar negative situation may blind us to the unique emotional experience that others have in this situation.

So what’s going on here? What could explain this unexpected finding? One possible explanation, which was supported by our follow-up study, is that participants who had a similar negative experience in the past were more likely to recall their own stressful experiences as they watched the videos. Recalling these relevant negative experiences may evoke personal emotional distress and discomfort in response to the other person’s distress. This overwhelming emotional reaction may divert the perceiver’s attention from the other person and focus it on themselves. This shift in focus may lead to perceiving others’ emotions less accurately.  

You might wonder whether sharing similar experiences (such as the ‘Me Too’ movement) always blinds us to others’ emotions. Well, our findings suggest that, if perceivers can manage their own emotions and stop themselves from (re-) experiencing their own distress, shared life experiences can be helpful for recognizing another person’s emotions.

Also, additional studies we conducted suggest that sharing an experience with another person brings us closer and can spark the beginning of what might later develop into a meaningful relationship. However, such meaningful relationships emerge slowly.  Our research suggests that during the initial steps of relationship building, sharing a common experience doesn’t necessarily enhance understanding of the other person’s negative emotional state. Thus, shared experiences can indeed make us feel closer to others, but at the same time they can blind us to how they actually feel.


For Further Reading

Israelashvili, J., Sauter D., & Fischer, A. (2020) Different faces of empathy: Feelings of similarity disrupt recognition of negative emotions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103912

Israelashvili, J., & Karniol, R. (2018) Testing Alternative Models of Dispositional Empathy: The Affect-to-Cognition (ACM) versus the Cognition-to-Affect (CAM) Model. Personality and Individual Differences, 121, 161-169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.09.036

Israelashvili, J., Sauter D.,& Fischer, A. (2020) Two facets of affective empathy: Concern and distress have opposite relationships to emotion recognition. Cognition and Emotionhttps://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1724893

Interview regarding my research and “How to build a culture of empathy” (January 2020). http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/Jacob-Israelashvili.htm
 

Jacob Israelashvili conducted this research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and is now a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research examines the empathetic processes that help people to care more and understand better.

Looking Forward to Doing and Having

By Amit Kumar

In the coming months, some tech-savvy executive will undoubtedly unveil Silicon Valley’s latest creation, one that will surely make your slower, suddenly outdated gadget pale in comparison. Retailers might deem it the “must-have” item of the moment, and scores of consumers are likely to pre-order this electronic good immediately after its specifications are announced. And then they’ll wait. Such products are typically not available for shipment right away, and so a few weeks will go by before these customers actually receive their much-sought-after possessions. Imagine you were one of these folks. How do you think you’d feel while you were waiting? Like you wish you could just get the thing now?

Waiting is a fascinating activity because sometimes it feels bad, prompting impatience, anxiety, or frustration. But it can also be positive, like when we look forward to what’s to come with great excitement and delight. My empirical work contends that the evaluation of one’s anticipatory state (i.e., whether waiting is unpleasant or enjoyable) depends on what it is one is waiting for.

Consider a different scenario. I recently moved to Chicago, and a similarly-priced purchase on the minds of many in The Windy City is snagging a reservation at Grant Achatz’s Michelin-starred restaurant, Alinea. Grabbing a table at this acclaimed bastion of molecular gastronomy is challenging; people typically reserve about two months in advance. And so they too wait. How do you suspect you’d feel in this situation, anticipating the arrival of the day of your meal?

As Cornell University professor Tom Gilovich and I have reviewed in a recent piece in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, a great deal of research on human behavior has found that people derive considerably more satisfaction from “experiential purchases” (money spent on doing, such as meals at restaurants, vacations, tickets to theater performances, and so on) than they do from “material purchases” (money spent on having, on possessions like clothing, furniture, jewelry, gadgets, and other goods).  Much of this scientific evidence has focused on how happy consumers feel when they are asked to reflect on experiences and material goods they’ve already bought.

Tom and I—along with our collaborator, Matt Killingsworth—published a series of studies in the journal Psychological Science in 2014 demonstrating that the hedonic benefits of experiential consumption actually extend across a rather broad time course, including the phase before we’ve even guzzled down our first cocktail by the pool or heard the initial riff in the band’s set. That is, experiences are not only more rewarding than material possessions after you’ve purchased them, but in anticipation as well. The pre-consumption stage tends to be more pleasurable, more exciting, and less tinged with impatience for experiential purchases we’re looking forward to relative to future material purchases we are planning on buying.

In this past April’s issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, I’ve shown that one consequence of the differences in what waiting feels like for experiential and material investments is that people will sometimes delay their consumption of experiences. It stands to reason that one might do this because doing so allows him or her to take advantage of the relatively more exciting anticipatory period that comes with experiential pursuits. Planning trips ahead of time, buying tickets to the show beforehand, and yes, making restaurant reservations well in advance can be a good idea because this increases the amount of time one can spend savoring future consumption.

In fact, although I doubt Chef Achatz has ever skimmed through a copy of any of my peer-reviewed papers, this seems to be something of which he is astutely aware. Indeed, if you were tempted to make a reservation at any of his fine-dining establishments, you’d do so by clicking a button that says “Book Your Experience.”

It is important to note that one does not have to shell out hundreds of dollars to glean the benefits in well-being that stem from buying experiences rather than things. To be sure, the cost of different experiential and material purchases does not statistically account for the marked difference in psychological states we observe.

While much of being a successful academic rests on ruling out certain mundane explanations for experimental findings—on what doesn’t explain the results of our studies—the more interesting question to me is what does.

Thus far, my colleagues and I have found evidence for one answer to this question, which was published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. One of the reasons people derive more pleasure from the anticipation of experiences than “stuff” is because future experiential purchases are more likely to be talked about with other people. Experiences make for better story material than possessions and experiential consumption is thus more likely to be discussed with others. The conversational value people obtain from experiential spending is important because strong social relationships are one thing social scientists know to be integral to human happiness.

Buying experiences can often be thought of as “fleeting” because experiences begin and end. At least one can hold on to a material good, right? Psychologically, it’s really the experiences that endure. Experiential purchases “last” because people benefit from them both before and after the experience has actually been consumed. We “hold on” to our experiences in our minds and the good feelings that come with them are prolonged because they provide the fodder for some of our richest social interactions.

So, if you’re having trouble deciding how to spend your hard-earned money: Even if culinary adventures aren’t your cup-of-foam, I’d suggest that instead of buying that material possession you’ve been eyeing, you might think about the destination you’ve been meaning to visit or the sports team you’ve really wanted to see in the flesh. Then go ahead and “book your experience.” You’ll likely be happier as a result.


Amit Kumar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He received his A.B. in Psychology and Economics from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Cornell. For more information, you can check out http://www.kumar-amit.com.

References:

Gilovich, T. & Kumar, A. (2015). We’ll always have Paris: The hedonic payoff from experiential and material investments. In M. Zanna and J. Olson (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 51 (pp. 147-187). New York: Elsevier.

Kumar, A. & Gilovich, T. (2015). Some “thing” to talk about? Differential story utility from experiential and material purchases. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(10), 1320-1331.

Kumar, A. & Gilovich, T. (2016). To do or to have, now or later? The preferred consumption profiles of material and experiential purchases. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(2), 169-178.

Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilovich, T. (2014). Waiting for merlot: Anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1924-1931.

Psychopathological, Paranormal, or Religious?

Suppose you were conscious of what seemed like another self—another personality—present in your body. Who or what is that "other self"? How would you describe what was going on? 

You might view the other self as an "alter personality" and explain that you had been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. You might view it as the spirit of a deceased person and tell us that you are a psychic or a medium channeling this spirit. You might view it as a possessing spirit which you invited into your body using a ritual or which entered against your will and must be exorcized. Perhaps, more prosaically, you might tell us that you are a highly creative person, maybe a novelist, and that the other self is a fictional character that seems to have taken on a mind of its own.

The Early History of Psychology Was Comparative

At the turn of the 20th century, some clinicians used hypnosis to induce "secondary personalities" in patients (mostly women) diagnosed with "hysteria" in order to surface hidden inner conflicts; at the same time psychical researchers, including psychologists such as William James, studied spiritualist mediums who claimed to be in contact with spirits of the dead. The Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy published From India to the Planet Mars (Eng. trans, 1900), a book-length case study of the medium Helene Smith, and the American neurologist Morton Prince published The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology (1905), a book-length study of the personalities of his patient, Christine Beachamp. Flournoy and Prince were aware of each other's work. Flournoy offered a psychological interpretation of Helene Smith's channeled entities, and Prince worried that, if he allowed psychical researchers to interact with his patient, she would come to view one of her secondary personalities as a spirit and herself as a medium. These clinicians and psychical researchers were all interested in dissociative phenomena; they approached their research comparatively, recognizing that the experiences of some patients diagnosed with hysteria and some spiritual mediums shared a similar subjective experience: the presence of another self in their bodies.

But the Comparative Approach Was Abandoned

Yet, despite the early promise of this comparative approach, it was largely abandoned as psychological research on "psychical" or "paranormal" phenomena was sidelined and replaced by subspecialties devoted to the psychological study of "religious experience" and the clinical study of "psychopathology." Today, research on experiences is still largely conducted within professional niches each based on its own theoretical concepts such as dissociation, hallucinations, and delusions within clinical psychology and psychiatry, and channeling, mediumship, seeing visions, and receiving prophecies within the psychology of religion and religious studies. In taking this discipline-specific approach, researchers obscure the common features of the experiences studied and limit their ability to investigate the extent to which culture shapes such experiences.

Culture Shapes What People Experience

Scholars have shown that culture shapes experiences—including what stands out for people as nonordinary. What a person learns from growing up in a given culture shapes their expectations about what can occur and their interpretation of what is going on as experiences unfold. Culture has the potential to make some experiences stand out and others recede into the background. For example:

  • When people mark experiences and the situations in which they are thought to occur as worthy of special attention, they can make experiences that seem ordinary to others stand out for them. Everyone has thoughts or feelings that suddenly pop into mind, but Latter-day Saints (LDS) mark such thoughts and feelings as potential signs of personal revelation, which heightens their importance and encourages them to reflect on their meaning. Everyone also experiences coincidences that seem meaningful, but most people chalk up such experiences to chance and quickly forget them; however, adherents of some traditions, such as New Age spiritualists, attach special significance to—and cultivate—such experiences.
  • When people seek certain experiences and actively cultivate them, otherwise rare experiences might become more common.  Long-term meditators report experiences, such as feelings of compassion for all living beings, that produce short-and long-term neural changes. Psychoactive drugs commonly produce nonordinary experiences, such as a sense of leaving one's body, perceiving and communicating with extraordinary beings, and ego dissolution.
  • When cultures disparage or pathologize experiences, people may be less likely to attend to them or remember them when they occur or be reluctant to report them. In secular societies, particularly those influenced by Protestant Christianity, people often disparage claims to have sensed "presences" or communicated with spirits, ghosts, or other extraordinary beings. Yet, people in societies around the world claim to have had such experiences and "grief hallucinations"—experiences of the presence of dead loved ones—remain common even in highly secular societies, though people may be reluctant to talk about them.
  • The extent to which experiences are viewed as distressing may depend on the way they are appraised. When hallucinations are framed positively as visions of divine figures or voices of deceased loved ones, or when dissociative experiences are interpreted as mediumship or channeling, people often seek such experiences and venerate those who have them. But when such experiences are framed in pathological terms, people are more likely to fear that they are going crazy and to find such experiences more distressing.

Although much about the precise ways in which culture interacts with experiences remains unknown, the general implications of such findings are clear. Nonordinary experiences are neither inherently pathological nor revelatory. They must be understood in their cultural context and in light of the "fruits" they bear for individuals and those around them. Nowadays, with the rising popularity—and legalization—of psychedelics, many people are actively seeking nonordinary experiences. If you have such an experience you can reflect on what it might mean, realizing that there are many possible interpretations. You can evaluate it by asking if the outcome is generally positive or negative. Is it giving you new insights and promoting positive changes in your life and the world around you, or is it causing you distress? Before cultivating or seeking nonordinary experiences—with the use of psychedelics or otherwise—you can ask whether doing so would be in keeping with your personal and social values or distract you from them. 

You can take the same approach when others share an experience they view as nonordinary with you. Rather than offer an immediate reaction, try exploring the context in which this experience occurred, the behaviors that followed it, and the goals it serves for those who have had it. Doing so might allow you to respond with greater understanding, discernment, and compassion.


For Further Reading

Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2014). Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (Second edition). American Psychological Association.

Kirmayer, L. J., & Ryder, A. G. (2016). Culture and psychopathology. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 143–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.020

Larøi, F., Luhrmann, T. M., Bell, V., Christian, W. A., Deshpande, S., Fernyhough, C., Jenkins, J., & Woods, A. (2014). Culture and hallucinations: Overview and future directions. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 40(Suppl_4), S213–S220. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu012

Taves, A., & Barlev, M. (2023). A feature-based approach to the comparative study of "nonordinary" experiences. American Psychologist, 78(1), 50–61. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000990


Ann Taves is a Distinguished Professor (Emerita) of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She uses historical and social scientific methods to study the effects of culture on what people experience and how they understand it.  

Michael Barlev is an Assistant Research Professor in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University. He combines theory, methods, and quantitative tools from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study social cognition and behavior and cultural universality and diversity.

Do You Have a Lot of Knowledge About Nonverbal Communication?

How should you improve your communication skills? I am sometimes asked by students, "Professor, I want to be able to communicate better" or "I want to acquire communication skills." Whenever I would then ask, "What do you think you should do?" some students would answer, "I guess I need to gain more experience" or "My parents and people at my part-time job advised me that 'Practice makes perfect.'"

It is true that there are aspects of communication that involve "learning physically" and "becoming accustomed" by accumulating experience. However, is that enough? Will communication improve with experience?

When we think of knowledge, studying and learning may come to mind, but when we play sports or when we cook, we always use our accumulated knowledge to act. For example, when practicing figure skating, if all you have to do is skate on ice, you may become capable of doing it well by getting your body used to the feeling of balancing despite falling over and over again. However, if you want to do advanced jumps and spins, you will not be able to do it well unless you know and understand theories and move your body based on those theories.

The same is true when communicating with others. By repeating the experience, you will be able to communicate at a certain level. However, if you are aiming for better communication and more desirable communication skills, it is necessary to acquire the theory and rules of communication as knowledge, and then generate messages and interpret messages received from others. In other words, correct and abundant knowledge about interpersonal communication influences the quality of communication, such as creating messages well and reading the intentions and emotions of others appropriately.

What is Knowledge About Nonverbal Communication?

Do you know specifically what kind of differences there are in facial expressions when others are happy versus when they are angry? Do you know the peculiarities of the way you speak when you are stressed? To have knowledge about nonverbal communication is to know the characteristics and rules of human communication behavior concretely, rather than vaguely. Now, do you have correct and abundant knowledge?

Psychologists Janelle Rosip and Judith Hall focused on nonverbal communication and developed the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge (TONCK), which measures a person's knowledge related to nonverbal cues. This was a test in the form of answering a question, such as "Rapid head nods are a signal to the speaker to finish quickly," with a choice of either true or false. However, the TONCK had 81 items, a large number, and so, along with Judith Hall, I developed a new version (TONCK-II) to make it easier to use. People who have a high percentage of correct answers on this test have a lot of correct knowledge about nonverbal communication. The TONCK tests and another one, the GEMOK-Features which was developed by Swiss psychologists Katja Schlegel and Klaus Scherer to measure knowledge about cues to emotion, are the only validated tests of nonverbal cue knowledge. Many avenues of future research open up with these tests. Two things we already know: People who score higher on these knowledge tests actually are better at interpreting emotional expressions conveyed by face, body, and voice, as measured with tests showing people's nonverbal cues. And, women tend to have an edge over men in their knowledge of nonverbal communication.

Negative Effects of Inaccurate Knowledge

If knowledge is to be acquired, of course it must be accurate knowledge. However, when it comes to communication, it is difficult to determine what the correct answer is in the first place, and the correct answer may change depending on the context. Therefore, the knowledge that you possess may actually be wrong. For example, according to Quinn Hirschi at the University of Virginia and colleagues, people assume that speaking less when meeting someone for the first time makes you more likeable. However, when they conducted an experiment, they found that this belief was false, and that the more people spoke, the more likeable they were.

False knowledge and beliefs can lead to ineffective or undesirable communication behaviors. In addition, people sometimes possess stereotypical cognitions of gender, nationality, age, etc. regarding communication behaviors. While there are communication behaviors that actually differ according to gender and culture, others are simply based on people's assumptions. Having correct knowledge is critical.

To those of you who read this article and decided to go to a bookstore and buy a book on communication: There are many unfounded and unreliable manuals in the world, so be careful when choosing books!


For Further Reading

Ogawa, K., & Hall, J. A. (2022). Development of the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge-II (TONCK-II). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46(4), 569-592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00414-5

Rosip, J. C., & Hall, J. A. (2004). Knowledge of nonverbal cues, gender, and nonverbal decoding accuracy. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28(4), 267–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-004-4159-6

Schlegel, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2018). The nomological network of emotional knowledge and understanding in adults: Evidence from two new performance-based tests. Cognition and Emotion, 32(8), 1514–1530. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1414687


Kazumi Ogawa is Professor of Faculty of Psychology at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan. She is interested in how we can improve our interpersonal communication performance, and in recent years has been studying the effectiveness of knowledge for interpersonal communication.