[pct-l] rural verses urban

[Yoshihiro Murakami]

Dear jack

On this topic, I have discussed in my last chapter of hiking handbook
entitled "why we walk?".

There are two hypothesis about a natural experience in modern
environmental psychology.
For the stress reduction theory of Ulrich(1981, 1991, etc),  there is
the power of the cure in nature, it  causes unconscious and  an
automatic reaction. He postulated that the landscape, which contains
green and scenery of the waterside has that effect.

Several PDF papers are open to access. one is

http://greenplantsforgreenbuildings.org/attachments/contentmanagers/25/HealthSettingsUlrich.pdf

Another hypothesis is Kaplan( 1995 )'s attention restoration theory,
in which he maintains conscious attention need energy, natural
landscape facilitate the recovery from fatigue. His hypothesis is
confirmed several cognitive experiment.

http://www.ideal.forestry.ubc.ca/frst524/09_kaplan.pdf

The both hypotheses are supported by many researches.

Cole and Hall (2010) investigated the 531 hikers in Oregon and
Washington, many hikers reported the stress reduction effects. The
effect of day hike was almost same to that of long distance hiking.
You can see at least abstract of this paper.

http://eab.sagepub.com/content/42/6/806.short

These effect may be due to the environment of evolutionary adaptation
(Grind and Patil, 2009).  Human may evolved near waterside, full of
green environment, so we love waterside and green environment.

My personal hypothesis is that the water may contain salt, green
forest may be narrow, so we sometimes had to go out our forest to get
some food. Because we like salt, and lose it from sweating. Our sense
of direction is very poor. If we became human in a vast environment,
we had more good sense of direction as like a birds.

I am sorry. my book was written in Japanese.



-- 
Sincerely
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Hiro    ( Yoshihiro Murakami  村上宣寛 )
facebook  http://www.facebook.com/completewalker
Blogs  http://completewalker.blogspot.jp/
Photo  https://picasaweb.google.com/104620544810418955412/
Backpacking since about 1980 in Japan
JMT, 2009, 2010, 2011(half).
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