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Interdisciplinary Research Identifies Neural Correlates – Potential for Disease Prevention – Publication in Nature Neuroscience
Courtesy KIT: Green areas in the city center can directly improve the well-being of everyday life for city dwellers. This is demonstrated by a recent interdisciplinary study in which the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was also involved. Consequently, green areas benefit mainly from people in whom the brain’s ability to regulate negative emotions is reduced. The study, which combines epidemiology, psychology, neuroimaging, and geoinformatics, is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038 / s41593-019-0451-y).
Not only in the summer heat do the nearby parks do with trees, shrubs, lawns and flower beds as well – because this is so, researchers have at the KIT Institute of Sport and Sports Science (IFSS), the Central Institute of Health. Mind (ZI) at Mannheim and Heidelberg University now examined at the neuronal level. “The study took an interdisciplinary approach, methods of epidemiology, psychology, neuroimaging and combines geoinformatics,” explains Professor Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, KIT IFSS Deputy Head and Director of the Mental Health Specialist mHealth Lab, which is on record of human experience and behavior in everyday life.
In the coordinated investigation at ZI Mannheim, 33 city dwellers aged 18-28 were asked to rate their mood about nine times a day within a week using specially equipped smartphones. Meanwhile, the participants went about their daily lives as usual. The proportion of green areas in each environment was then determined using high resolution aerial photographs and geoinformatics methods. Participants showed a higher level of well-being when they were surrounded by more green spaces in the city. In a second step, 52 other young adults were asked to rate their mood in everyday life in the same way. These participants were additionally submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) after the seven-day evaluation phase. With this method, certain brain functions can be represented. The results of the second group were consistent with those of the first round.
The KIT Mental Health Laboratory was responsible for recording and assessing the whereabouts of the subjects and for repeatedly recording wellness on smartphones in so-called GPS-driven electronic journals. Similarly, the team recorded more sensor data on the subjects’ daily physical activity and meteorological data, and also assumed the evaluation of these complex data with multi-level statistical models. “Our configuration of the method made it possible to determine if current exposure of green spaces in the city center directly affects the well-being of individuals,” explains Markus Reichert of the Mental Health Lab, along with Dr. med. Urs Braun and ZI Professor Heike Tost one of the first authors of the study. “This so-called issue within the subject was first investigated in this form.”
Urban planning and health promotion
Results of the study, now published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The researchers observed reduced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in people who responded positively to green areas in their daily lives. This region of the brain plays a central controlling role in processing negative emotions and stressful environmental experiences. “These results suggest that green spaces are particularly important for people whose ability to regulate negative emotions is reduced,” says Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, CEO of ZI and Medical Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy.
“The study results are extremely interesting for urban planning in terms of health promotion,” adds Markus Reichert. “Well-spaced green spaces within a city can have significant potential to prevent mental illness.” Previous research has shown that people who grew up in the city and currently live in the city respond differently to stress than rural residents and have a significantly higher risk of suffer from depression, schizophrenia or anxiety disorders. This discovery is even more serious as urbanization progresses rapidly: according to the United Nations, more people now live in the city than in the countryside. By 2050, it is estimated that about two thirds of all people live in the cities.
Original Publication:
Heike Tost Markus Reichert, Urs Brown, Iris Reinhard, Robin Peters, Sven Lautenbach, Andreas Hoell, Emanuel Schwarz, Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Alexander Zipf and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg: neural correlates of individual differences in affective benefits from urban real-life exposure to the green space. Nature Neuroscience, July 29, 2019.
DOI: 10.1038 / s41593-019-0451-y
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