Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Two Texas A&M studies on the restorative powers of nature were cited in a recent article examining the maturation of ecopsychology as a legitimate field of study.
The cover story, “This Side of Paradise: Discovering Why the Human Mind Needs Nature,” penned by Eric Jaffe, a blogger for Psychology Today, appears in the May/June issue of Observer, a publication of The Association for Psychological Science.
Today more than ever, Jaffe says, the scientific community is embracing what in 1865 Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated designer of New York City’s Central Park, called the “scientific fact” that nature “is favorable to the health and vigor of men.”
In support of this premise, Jaffe cited a number of recent studies, going back to the landmark paper authored by Roger Ulrich, a professor of architecture at Texas A&M, which found that patients whose hospital window peers into nature “recorded shorter postoperative stays, required less potent pain medication, and evaluated their nurses more positively after gall bladder surgery than patients who looked onto a brick wall.”
Ulrich’s 1984 paper, published in Science, Jaffe wrote, informed the design for the 2008 reconstruction of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, in Springfield, Ore.
The article also highlighted a 1998 paper by Texas A&M researchers comparing the physiological responses of subjects who watched a video of driving through nature with those who watched a drive through more constructed environments.
“Not only did the nature-road group display lower levels of stress,” wrote Jaffe, “they also recovered more quickly from the stress they did experience.”
The Texas A&M study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, was led by Russ Parsons, who now heads Northwest Environmental Psychology, Inc., with contributing authors Louis Tassinary, professor of visualization; Roger Ulrich; Michelle Hebl, now professor of psychology at Rice University; and the late Michelle Grossman-Alexander, who before her death served as an assistant professor at the University of Maine. When the paper was published, Parsons, was engaged in post-doctorate studies with Tassinary in the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s psychophysiology laboratory. Hebl and Grossman-Alexander were graduate students in the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M.
The Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of scientific psychology and its representation at the national and international level. Its mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, teaching, and the improvement of human welfare.
Jaffe’s article is available online at
http://www.psychologicalscience.org
A digital edition of the May/June Observer can be accessed at
http://www.psychologicalscience.org
- Posted:July 14, 2010 -
