Exploring Emotional Experiences of the Healing Effects of Greenery: A Text Mining Analysis

Abstract

Recently, the dilution of our “connectedness to nature” has come to be regarded as a problem. This study aimed to reveal the general outline of the emotional experiences that arise from exposure to greenery. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 457 participants. We extracted frequent words from 384 passages of free description data about emotional experience and created a co-occurrence network using text mining software. The most frequent word was “flower,” the next was “see.” We extracted terms indicating active involvement such as “nurturing” flowers and “decorating” with flowers, as well as remote relationships such as “seeing” flowers, from the co-occurrence network. Further, we were able to grasp the differences in emotional experience according to gender and age group, by conducting gender-specific and age-specific analyses.