For the study, published March 30 in PLoS One, researchers combined data from social media and city parks in the 25 largest U.S. cities and found that park visitors experienced a “happiness benefit” that was roughly equivalent to the mood spike people feel on holidays like Thanksgiving or New Year’s Day. The results showed that the bigger the park, the bigger the benefit. “These new findings underscore just how essential nature is for our mental and physical health,” said a coauthor of the study, Taylor Ricketts, PhD, a professor and the director of the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont in Burlington, in a press release. “These results are especially timely given our increased reliance on urban natural areas during the COVID pandemic.”
Measuring Happiness, 1 Tweet at a Time
The study used two tools — Twitter posts and geolocation data — to quantify the happiness benefit that people get from nature. More than 1.5 million Twitter posts were analyzed to measure differences in online sentiment, comparing tweets posted inside city parks to those posted elsewhere. The happiness benefit was calculated by word frequency differences between the in-park tweets and control tweets. Positive words included “beautiful,” “fun,” “enjoying,” and “amazing” and appeared more frequently in in-parks tweets. Negative words such as “don’t,” “not,” and “hate” appeared less frequently in tweets from parks. Investigators used information from the Trust for Public Land (TPL) to calculate how much a city invested in the park for amenities and upkeep, and to find the size of each park. The city parks were grouped parks into four categories according to their size: less than 1 acre, between 1 and 10 acres, between 10 and 100 acres, and greater than 100 acres.
And the Top 10 Cities With Happy Parks Are …
The cities with the happiest parks, according to the analysis were:
Estimating Nature’s Impact on Mood via Twitter
The results showed a happiness benefit from city parks during all seasons, months, weeks, days, and times of day, though the effects were most prominent during the summer and weekends. Although researchers didn’t find a link between the funding or amenities of a given park and the happiness level, it appeared that the “happiest” parks were the largest parks by area — those greater than 100 acres. “Being in nature offers restorative benefits not available for purchase in a store, or downloadable on a screen,” said another coauthor, Chris Danforth, PhD, a professor of mathematics at the University of Vermont, in the release. “However, not all parks appear to be equal when it comes to happiness. The ability to immerse yourself in a larger, greener natural area had a greater effect than smaller paved city parks.” The authors suggest that larger parks may be better at boosting mood because they “provide greater opportunities for mental restoration and separation from the taxing environment of the city.”
Authors Advocate for Expansion and Protection of Urban Nature
Researchers acknowledged the irony of using Twitter to measure happiness in nature, given the platform’s reputation as a hub for “doom scrolling.” “But our goal is to use technology for the greater good — to better understand the effect nature has on humans, which until now has been difficult to quantify in such large numbers,” said the lead author Aaron Schwartz, PhD in the release. Given their findings, the authors suggest that urban nature should be protected, expanded, and made as accessible as possible, especially since city parks are the primary access to nature for millions of people.
