Discussion
’ attention and creativity
PHYSIOLOGICAL STRESS
We recorded physiological stress indicators, cognitive functions measurements, and self-reported data from 30 participants during exposures to four biophilic interventions and one control non-biophilic scene. After removing the anomalies, no significant differences were found for physical and cognitive measurements. However, the estimated coefficients for subjective stress ratings suggested stress relief effects in all the interventions. Thus, there existed a discrepancy between participants’ objective stress measurements and subjective feelings. Meanwhile, participants’ attention and creativity showed no consistent improvement across the interventions. All the results were not statistically significant, suggesting potential random effects. We also believe that the study is underpowered due to small sample size and small effect sizes. In general, participants subjectively felt significantly less stress and more connection with nature in all the interventions. Therefore, we were able to partly confirm our hypothesis about the positive but different impacts of the biophilic interventions from the mental side, but could not confirm the negative impacts of the turbidity based on the current evidence.