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Happiness and life satisfaction are more strongly associated with enjoying nature than with simply visiting it

Date: 2025-08-04

The benefits to one's well-being due to nature contact have been addressed in various disciplines. The well-being benefits of enjoyment of nature elicited by exposure to natural environments, however, has received little research attention. A research team led by Dr. Pei-Shan Liao at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, has explored the relationship between nature contact and subjective well-being (SWB) from a hedonic perspective, focusing on the often-overlooked role of enjoyment in natural settings. Using representative survey data combined with environmental data (e.g., weather and air quality), the study examines how both physical and perceptual (enjoyment-based) contact with nature relate to general happiness and life satisfaction. A two-stage estimation approach reveals that while enjoyment of nature is positively associated with SWB, physical contact with nature is not directly linked to SWB and may even negatively mediate the enjoyment–SWB relationship. The findings suggest that perceptual contact with nature is a more significant contributor to well-being than physical contact alone. The research has been published on May 10, 2025 in Journal of Environmental Psychology. The authors including Dr. Daigee Shaw and Dr. Le-Yu Chen (Institute of Economics), and Dr. Chuan-Yao Lin (Research Center for Environmental Changes).

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