With the rapid advancements in technology, researchers are seeking new ways to incorporate modern high-tech solutions such as virtual reality into treatment paradigms for stress. The current experiment explores the beneficial effects of immersing an individual into virtual reality after a stressful encounter. I examined the potential restorative effects of three unique immersive virtual reality environments by inducing stress and negative affect in sixty-nine participants and then randomly assigning them to freely explore one of three environments (a virtual nature setting, a virtual urban cityscape, or a neutral environment composed of solid geometric shapes) for ten minutes. Participants who explored the nature environment were found to have significantly improved affect (as measured by a standardized questionnaire), and significantly lower stress levels (as measured by self-report and skin-conductance levels) compared to those who explored the urban and geometric environments. The results suggest that virtual nature has restorative properties similar to real nature, and that simply immersing participants into a virtual nature setting can reduce stress. These results also suggest that the content of the virtual reality experience (i.e., whether it contains nature) is important in promoting restoration, and that in the absence of nature, stress levels remain unchanged.

With the rapid advancements in technology, researchers are seeking new ways to incorporate modern high-tech solutions such as virtual reality into treatment paradigms for stress. The current experiment explores the beneficial effects of immersing an individual into virtual reality after a stressful encounter. I examined the potential restorative effects of three unique immersive virtual reality environments by inducing stress and negative affect in sixty-nine participants and then randomly assigning them to freely explore one of three environments (a virtual nature setting, a virtual urban cityscape, or a neutral environment composed of solid geometric shapes) for ten minutes. Participants who explored the nature environment were found to have significantly improved affect (as measured by a standardized questionnaire), and significantly lower stress levels (as measured by self-report and skin-conductance levels) compared to those who explored the urban and geometric environments. The results suggest that virtual nature has restorative properties similar to real nature, and that simply immersing participants into a virtual nature setting can reduce stress. These results also suggest that the content of the virtual reality experience (i.e., whether it contains nature) is important in promoting restoration, and that in the absence of nature, stress levels remain unchanged.

The diploma thesis is based on research findings that the natural environment can help restore depleted emotional and cognitive resources. Theoretical part summarizes the results of research studies in this area and provides a sufficient number of studies which have confirmed the above mentioned phenomenon. In the empirical part I am devoted to ascertaining whether the picture of environment can have restorative effect on cognitive and emotional resources, and compare the effects of three different outdoor environments. The research was conducted by experiment, respondents were exposed to visual stimulus material with motives of natural environment, park or urban environment and then was measured their attention and mood.

In this thesis, the restorative effects of exposure to nature are examined through the lens of existing restoration theories. Limitations of existing theories, such as Attention Restoration Theory and Psycho-evolutionary Restoration Theory, are highlighted. To address the limitations of existing theories, an expanded theoretical framework is proposed: The expanded framework introduces a newly proposed neural mechanism and theory of restoration that build on existing theories by proposing a link to recently discovered reward systems in the ventral visual pathway. Results from six experiments provide consistent evidence to suggest that positive and negative responses to visual scenes are related to the low-level visuospatial properties of the scenes. Specifically, a discovery is made to suggest that the power of a limited visual spatial frequency range can consistently predict responses to natural, urban, and abstract scenes on measures of restoration (blink-rates, number of fixations, self-reported stress and pleasantness). This provides the first evidence to suggest that low-level visual properties of scenes may play an important role in affective and physiological responses to scenes. Furthermore, this newly discovered relationship provides a new way to objectively predict the relative restorative value of any given scene.

The work deals with theoretical research of basis of Environmental Psychology for Outdoor Education. It answers two questions ? why in the conceptions of Outdoor Education is nature the preferred environment and what are the benefits of nature for physical, mental and social health. The answers to theses questions are in the work described through theories of environmental preference and restorative effects of nature. There are three major sections of the work. The first part discusses the basis, principles and contents of Environmental Psychology and Outdoor Education, the core terminology of the work, and the nodal points of Environmental Psyhcology and the theory of Outdoor Education. Second part describes those theories and concepts of Environmental Psychology which are related to the primary and subsidiary research questions. The third part evaluates the impacts and relevance of environmental-psychological knowledge on concepts of Outdoor Education.