close connection between people and the land is evident from
Korpela’s own life and work.
“As a teenager, I used to sometimes go run in the woods and stop
at a big rock where you could see the lake,” he said. “I noticed it was
a way of calming myself and regulating my emotions so I had this
habit of going and stopping there.” Now a trim professor sporting
facial hair reminiscent of Freud’s goatee period, Korpela has become
known for studies about “favorite places” and their positive influence
on mental health. In his studies, when he asks respondents to name
their favorite places, over 60 percent describe a natural area such as
lake, beach, park, garden or woods.
If there was something special about nature, Korpela wanted to
find out how quickly it worked on our emotional brains. If the
psychoevolutionary theory of Roger Ulrich (hospital window guy) is
correct, then our responses to pleasant nature spots should be
automatic, and perhaps immediate. One classic way to measure
positive and negative emotions is to show people pictures of faces and
have them rate them for moods like fear, anger, happiness and
surprise, while timing the exercise. Happier people will recognize
happiness in others more quickly, and take longer to recognize fear or
disgust.
Korpela primed a group of volunteers by quickly showing them
photographs of various scenes that had been manipulated along a
spectrum from urban to buildings-with-trees to just trees or parkland
without structures. After each photo, the volunteers were asked to
identify the emotions in pictures of the faces he showed them.
Interestingly, after looking at scenes with more nature, the subjects
were quicker to recognize happiness and slower to recognize negative
emotions like anger and fear. The inverse was true after the more
urban shots. In other words, looking at nature photos made them
behave (instantly) in happier ways. To Korpela, the study confirmed
Ulrich’s hypothesis of nature causing a rapid emotional response at a