Are All Types of Natural Environments Created Equal? A Comparison of Different Elements in Nature for Improving Restoration in Work Environments

Abstract

Prior research suggested images that feature aquatic elements were perceived to be more restorative. Specifically, images with a larger proportion of aquatic elements compared to greenery elements were more restorative than images that contained just greenery elements. This idea has been referred to as the “dose effect” of water. However, related work was not able to extend these results, leading to questions about the validity of the effect. The current study was conducted to determine whether we could replicate the “dose effect” using the same images as previous researchers and whether we could generalize the “dose effect” to a unique set of images. Our results indicated that we were unable to replicate the “dose effect” using the same images utilized in prior research, and we were also unable to generalize it to a unique set of images.

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