However, a recent paper published in The Society for Consumer Psychology suggests that the restorative qualities of nature might be overblown, and that certain people might find lush trees, chirping birds, and blue skies anything but zen-like. Kevin P. Newman, an assistant professor of marketing at Providence College, and his co-author Merrie Brucks, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona, teamed up to explore whether people who tend to be more neurotic might actually find relief from the very source of their racing thoughts and buzzing brain.
To figure this out, Newman and Brucks asked participants to complete a widely recognized 12-item survey—the Eysenck Peronality Questionnaire—to evaluate neurotic traits, such as anxiety, a tendency to overanalyze, perpetual feelings of fear and threat, envy, and loneliness. Then, participants solved puzzles after being primed with images of either a cityscape or a rural landscape. The puzzles—some of which were unsolvable—were meant to measure self-control and see if one particular environment induced stressful behavior over another.
The researchers discovered that neurotic people found “high-anxiety” situations to be more calming for their minds. In another experiment, Newman and Brucks ran a soothing ocean wave soundtrack followed by a tape of honking horns. Surprise: neurotics didn’t find the blare of taxi cab horns annoying. Actually, they found it rather satisfying.
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