Media-based nature exposure and negative psychological states: effects of natural environment videos on attentional bias and valence perception

Exposure to natural environments has well-documented benefits for emotion regulation and cognitive functioning. However, whether media-based nature exposure is similarly associated with negative psychological states and the emotional-processing mechanisms potentially involved remains unclear. Using one survey study and two experimental studies, we examined the associations between media-based nature exposure, negative psychological states, and emotional information processing at two temporal scales: habitual exposure to nature-related media content and brief experimental exposure to nature videos.

Study 1 used an online survey to examine the associations of perceived real-world greenness and the frequency of nature-related media exposure with negative psychological states. Study 2 employed a dot-probe task to assess attentional bias toward emotional faces after participants viewed natural environment videos. Study 3 used a valence-evaluation task to examine changes in the perceived valence of emotional faces following video exposure.

The results showed that (1) greater perceived real-world greenness and more frequent media-based nature exposure were associated with lower levels of negative psychological states; (2) attentional bias toward negative faces was lower after exposure to natural environment videos than after exposure to the neutral video; and (3) valence ratings of neutral and positive faces were more positive following exposure to natural environment videos, whereas ratings of negative faces did not differ significantly between the two video conditions. Overall, these findings provide preliminary evidence that media-based nature exposure may be associated with negative psychological states and emotional information processing. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32400923), the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2024NSFSC1226), and the Major Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research (21JZD063).

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32400923), the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2024NSFSC1226) and the Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences (21JZD063). Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China School of Education, Fujian Polytechnic of Information Technology, Fuzhou, China The authors declare no competing interests. This study was approved by the Ethics Review Board of Sichuan Normal University (ID: 2023LS018) and was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to their inclusion in the study. During the preparation of this manuscript, the authors used ChatGPT (OpenAI) for language refinement and improvement of readability. The authors subsequently reviewed and edited the content as necessary and take full responsibility for the content and accuracy of the published work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.