The researchers conducted an online experiment on 295 participants.
Have you ever wondered why it seems so soothing to listen to birds chirping in the morning? Well, a new study has found that listening to bird songs can help get over stress and anxiety in humans. The evaluation of the effects of urban traffic noise versus natural birdsong on participants' cognitive and emotional function was done by a team of researchers from Germany.
According to a study published in the Nature portfolio journal Scientific Reports, another objective was to investigate the influence of reduced vs. higher soundscape variety by changing the amount of various typical traffic noises or songs of different bird species within the respective soundscapes.
The researchers conducted an online experiment where 295 participants were randomly assigned to one of four treatments for 6 minutes: traffic noise low, traffic noise high, birdsong low, and birdsong high variety soundscapes. The participants also completed a digit-span and dual n-back task before and after the exposure, as well as sadness, anxiety, and paranoid questionnaires.
According to Newsweek, as the world is quickly urbanizing, the environment in which humans live is changing constantly too. It is anticipated that by 2050, about 70% of the world's population will be living in cities, with certain regions, such as Europe, already exceeding this figure.
Learning how the urban environment influences our well-being is an essential task given that urbanisation has been related to poorer mental health outcomes. However, the importance of environmental factors on human well-being and cognition has frequently been underestimated in conventional psychological studies.
Emil Stobbe, an author of the study with the Lise Meitner Group, told Newsweek, "My colleagues and I are generally fascinated by the impact of the environment on humans, and by our research also want to raise the awareness about the interdependence between humans and nature."
In the field of environmental neurosciences, we aim at studying the healing impacts of natural environments, she added.
The German researchers are linked with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development's Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Department Eppendorf's of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, reported Newsweek.