There's no place like home? The psychological, physiological, and cognitive effects of short visits to outdoor urban environments compared to staying in the indoor home environment, a field experiment on women from two ethnic groups

Background: The home environment is regarded as a safe, comfortable environment, however, home can also be a stressful place. Compared to staying in the indoor home environment, the effects of short visits to outdoor urban environments on short-term psychological, physiological and cognitive responses were not studied previously. Aim: To evaluate whether visits to different urban and ethnic environments, in comparison to staying in the home indoor environment, leads to short-term changes in psychological, physiological and cognitive responses and whether these responses are independent of ethnicity. Methods: The participants, 20-35 year-old healthy women (N = 72, 48 Arab and 24 Jewish), started the experiment at their home and visited six different outdoor urban environments in predominantly ethnic Arab or Jewish cities, in Israel. First they visited intra-ethnic city and afterward inter-ethnic city environments. In each city they first visited an urban park and afterward, in a random order, a residential neighborhood and the city center. In each environment (including home) the following measures were used to evaluate psychological, physiological and cognitive effects: mood (measured as positive and negative emotions, cheerfulness, relaxed, natural and discomfort feelings), autonomic nervous system balance (assessed using heart rate variability (HRV)) and working memory (measured by a backwards digit-span task). Several potential mediators were measured: carbon monoxide (CO), heat, noise, social aspects, and the self-perceived restoration scale. Results: Compared to staying in the indoor home environment, short visits to outdoor urban environments, specifically intra and inter-ethnic parks, were associated with beneficial psychological, physiological, and cognitive responses, and the strongest effects were found for the intra-ethnic park. The results for the other urban environments were different between Jewish and Arab women. The self-perceived restoration, social aspects and reduced CO, heat and noise exposures during the visits did not explain the observed changes between the outdoor environments and home. Conclusions: Visits to urban parks compared to staying in the home environment had beneficial short-term changes in psychological, physiological, and cognitive responses, regardless of ethnicity. The changes could not be attributed to the investigated mediators. Women should be encouraged to go outdoors and specifically visit parks to improve their psychological and physiological health.