I read that "BBC Earth commissioned a multi-country online quantitative study to examine the impact of watching natural history content on viewers’ emotions. This was conducted in partnership with an international panel company, with data collected and weighted to be nationally representative in each country. Respondents viewed one of five clips: two from Planet Earth II, one from a popular drama, one montage of news coverage, and one control video.
The hypothesis was that watching content from Planet Earth II could improve the sensation of positive emotions and reduce the sensation of negative emotions. The study found a range of significant results evidencing not only that watching content from Planet Earth II inspired significant increases in feelings of awe, contentedness, joy, amusement and curiosity, but that it also acted to reduce feelings of tiredness, anger and stress. In the majority of cases, changes in emotions were caused by the type of content viewed, and significantly different from the control group. Our findings therefore support the conclusion that viewing Planet Earth II inspires positive changes in emotions that are distinct to the natural history genre
You can read the report here.
So, is it now official that you can get the benefits of being outside "in nature" by staying indoors and watching TV? Is it even better, I wonder, if you watch the programme on your balcony or in the garden? We need to know.
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Meanwhile, and entirely unrelatedly, Foofaraw is my new word of the month. How come I've lived all these years and not come across this? Given that it means a fuss made over nothing, you'd have thought I'd have been using it every day, given how much nonsense there is about. The trick is to keep using it. I've already forgotten what last month's new word was.
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