Editorial: Nature and the Environment: The Psychology of Its Benefits and Its Protection

The goal of this Research Topic was to bring together research and scholarship from two seemingly disparate fields: (1) the psychological and health benefits attained by interacting with natural environments and (2) the variables that facilitate people's recognition of environmental issues that would foster a more positive attitude toward the protection of nature. The first portion of this e-book concerns the positive benefits (health, psychological, affective, etc.. .) that can be gained from interacting with more natural environments. There is now a considerable amount of evidence in support of the beneficial effects that nature can have on an individual's cognitive functioning and health. Kuo (2015) provides an excellent review toward understanding he interaction of nature and health. Kuo hypothesizes a central pathway for how nature improves health through enhanced immune functioning. Furthermore, Kuo suggests public policy to implement green spaces with plants, soil, and moving water in areas where health risks are high as an inexpensive public health intervention. Szolosi et al. (2014) examined if nature's perceived mysteriousness had an effect on direct cognitive benefits. They showed that with enough exposure to an image, more mysterious nature images achieved greater improvements in recognition performance than nature images with low perceived mystery (Szolosi et al., 2014). Capaldi et al. (2014) performed a meta-analysis regarding the potential beneficial relationship between nature and health. Reported vitality, positive affect, and life satisfaction all had a strong relationship with nature connectedness. This analysis further concluded strong associations between happiness and inclusion of nature in the self, nature relatedness, and connectedness to nature (Capaldi et al., 2014). Interestingly, participants do not necessarily have to be consciously aware of the restorative environmental stimuli to obtain the benefits. According to the results of Lin et al. (2014), participants received an effect of attention restoration with minimal or absent awareness to the restorative stimuli using digital images. We must also be cautious when it comes to some of this environmental research. Pearson and Craig (2014) performed a review of the existing literature and call for future research to focus on substantiating the rather simplistic dichotomy of " nature " vs. " built " environments (Pearson and Craig, 2014). The review by Pearson and Craig also brought up the topic of immersive of the nature intervention. Many studies have focused primarily on studying human interactions with only images of natural and urban environments. The authors suggest that future studies should …