http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6843-8557
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ABSTRACT
Almost four decades ago, Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Recovery Theory postulated that nature could help people to recover from the attentional fatigue and the emotional negative outcomes coming from their daily performance. Since then, these theories have inspired a great amount of research. In this review, 19 restoration pretest-posttest field studies were selected. A systematic analysis of the papers was conducted using two rating tools to assess the quality of the studies and to detect their main strengths and weaknesses. The results allowed us to synthesise the results of this sample of studies, to reflect about the nature of the research conducted until today and to point to some issues and challenges that might be addressed in future studies.
Acknowledgements
Authors of the paper would like to express their gratitude to the reviewers of the paper for their role in the improvement of the earlier version of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Here, some debate was held between the authors, because many studies compared natural places with urban ones, or different kinds of naturals. But in its essence, there were no control groups as they were treated as groups receiving another Environmental Treatment.
2. Three used cognitive loading tasks to fatigue [2,5,6] them and 2 were conducted after daily performance in work and studies [8,18]. In addition, these studies usually reported the pretest scores for the variables included in the design. Most of the remaining studies only reported the change rates experienced by the participants, not allowing inferring their psychological state.