The impact of nature exposure on body image and happiness: an experience sampling study

ABSTRACT

Exposure to nature is associated with improved psychological well-being and positive body image. Here, we examined whether everyday exposure to natural environments is associated with state body image outcomes (and, for comparative reasons, state happiness) using an experience sampling method. One-hundred-and-seven participants completed a 30-day experience sampling phase in which they reported their state body image (body weight, body shape, and physical appearance satisfaction), state happiness, and features of the surrounding environment (total = 6,025 responses) at three random time-points each day. Results indicated that being outdoors was associated with significantly higher state body image on all three indicators, but effect sizes were lower compared to effects on state happiness. Specific environment type was also important, with blue-spaces and wood- and grasslands, respectively, having stronger effects than other environments. These results provide evidence that everyday exposure to natural environments is associated with more positive state body image and greater happiness.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature exposure
• body image
• experience sampling
• natural environment

Acknowledgments

We thank Alina Flicker, Marlene Katzensteiner, Samantha Hochstöger, Jasmin Willinger, Alina Doll, Hannah Maurer, Anja Bauer, and Chiara Bertagnoli for their support in data collection, and David Lewetz for his technical support.

Notes

1. We also analysed whether weekends vs. weekdays had some predictive value on body image outcomes. For all body image measures, we found no significant effects. Therefore, we did not include this variable into our final model. For happiness, there was a significant but small effect (on weekends, happiness was 0.88 points higher on a VAS from 0 to 100 compared to weekdays; standardized beta =.04, i.e., half of a small effect; see also Stieger and Reips 2019). Because, the coefficients of the other predictors in the model did not substantially change, we do not present this additional analysis in detail.