Positive emotional responses while walking along a forest route compared with a city route: evidence from wearable facial electromyography

The potential of forests to induce positive emotions is attracting increasing attention. Previous studies have reported that walking in forests, compared with cities, is associated with more positive subjective experiences and physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system. However, because autonomic activity primarily reflects emotional arousal rather than valence, physiological evidence for positive emotional elicitation has remained limited.

We hypothesized that facial electromyography (EMG) could address this gap. We used a wearable device to obtain EMG measurements from the corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major while participants walked along a forest route or a city route. First-person video was recorded, and cued-recall procedures were used to obtain dynamic valence ratings.

Participants reported more positive valence and showed reduced corrugator supercilii activity while walking along the forest route than the city route. Dynamic valence ratings were also associated with corrugator supercilii activity. These findings provide initial evidence of positive emotional responses, reflected in both subjective states and facial muscle activity, while walking along the forest route compared with the city route.

The authors thank Shimadzu Corporation for their support in acquiring the data, and Masaru Usami and Koichi Murata for their technical support. Psychological Process Team, Guardian Robot Project, RIKEN, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0288, Japan Field Science Education and Research Center, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo, Oiwake-cho, 606-78502, Japan Wataru Sato, Naoko Tokuchi & Sakiko Yoshikawa Kyoto University of the Arts, 2-116 Uryuyama Kitashirakawa, Sakyo, Kyoto, 606- 8271, Kyoto, Japan The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Supplementary Table 1: Mean dynamic valence ratings, facial electromyography signals, and intra-individual cross-correlation coefficients for each condition of each participant. 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.

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