December 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 32

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ANDY DUBAK

CONSERVATION

Can a Walk in the Park Put
You in a Holiday Mood?
Twitter study shows the greener the urban green
space, the more cheerful people become
By Joshua Brown

H

aving one of those days - grumpy and blue? Head for the
biggest, greenest park you can find and take a walk under some
trees. Why?
A first-of-its-kind study by a team of scientists from the University of Vermont (UVM) shows that visitors to urban parks use happier
words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit
- and that their elevated mood lasts for up to four hours afterwards. The
effect is so strong that the increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost
of urban nature is equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas Day, by far
the happiest day each year on Twitter.
With more people living in cities,
and growing rates of mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health
and urban planning.
The new study, titled " Visitors to ur-

30

Parks & Recreation

ban greenspace have higher sentiment
and lower negativity on Twitter "
(https://tinyurl.com/y2nqb7gw),
was published this summer in People
and Nature, an open-access journal of
the British Ecological Society.

| D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9 | W W W. PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N . O R G

Green Impact
For three months, the UVM team
of scientists studied hundreds of
tweets per day that people posted
from 160 parks in San Francisco. " We found that, yes, across
all the tweets, people are happier
in parks, " says Aaron Schwartz,
a UVM doctoral student who led
the new research, " but the effect
was stronger in large regional parks
with extensive tree cover and vegetation. " Smaller neighborhood
parks showed a smaller spike in
positive mood and mostly paved
civic plazas and squares showed
the least mood elevation.



December 2019 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2019 - Parks & Recreation

December 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 1
December 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 2
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