Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Education Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

PDF

Utah State University

Series

2020

Environment

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Education

Promoting Healthy Decision-Making Via Natural Environment Exposure: Initial Evidence And Future Directions, Meredith S. Berry, Meredith A. Repke, Alexander L. Metcalf, Kerry Jordan Jul 2020

Promoting Healthy Decision-Making Via Natural Environment Exposure: Initial Evidence And Future Directions, Meredith S. Berry, Meredith A. Repke, Alexander L. Metcalf, Kerry Jordan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Research within psychology and other disciplines has shown that exposure to natural environments holds extensive physiological and psychological benefits. Adding to the health and cognitive benefits of natural environments, evidence suggests that exposure to nature also promotes healthy human decision-making. Unhealthy decision-making (e.g., smoking, non-medical prescription opioid misuse) and disorders associated with lack of impulse control [e.g., tobacco use, opioid use disorder (OUD)], contribute to millions of preventable deaths annually (i.e., 6 million people die each year of tobacco-related illness worldwide, deaths from opioids from 2002 to 2017 have more than quadrupled in the United States alone). Impulsive and unhealthy …


Natural Categorization: Electrophysiological Responses To Viewing Natural Versus Built Environments, Salif Mahamane, Nick Wan, Alexis Porter, Allison S. Hancock, Justin Campbell, M. S. Lyons, Kerry Jordan Jun 2020

Natural Categorization: Electrophysiological Responses To Viewing Natural Versus Built Environments, Salif Mahamane, Nick Wan, Alexis Porter, Allison S. Hancock, Justin Campbell, M. S. Lyons, Kerry Jordan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Environments are unique in terms of structural composition and evoked human experience. Previous studies suggest that natural compared to built environments may increase positive emotions. Humans in natural environments also demonstrate greater performance on attention-based tasks. Few studies have investigated cortical mechanisms underlying these phenomena or probed these differences from a neural perspective. Using a temporally sensitive electrophysiological approach, we employ an event-related, implicit passive viewing task to demonstrate that in humans, a greater late positive potential (LPP) occurs with exposure to built than natural environments, resulting in a faster return of activation to pre-stimulus baseline levels when viewing natural …