Communing with nature

A scientific study on stuff that we probably already knew.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/nature_and_compassion.php

Who's we? Read the bottom line. Green Party, a front for the Communist Party. Read more carefully.

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Old Dude

It's hard to make sense of the study on close examination and no links to the original work. Feeling, stress, fear, anti-social emotions are notoriously hard to measure. Even "stress" has no actual measurable medical definition that I am aware of. It is possible to measure epinephrine and cortisol levels as a measure of stress, but it is a leap to assume that changes in these mean anything. Often the psychologial evaluations use linear analog scales with self assessment (for example mark your pain on this 10 cm, 0-10 scale) with the assumption that 2.5 is different than a 2.0.

Could the "prosocial" behavior reflected a sense of anxiety and need to "huddle together" in natural environments? Need to share to survive??
Who knows??

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2009 09:38AM by Frank Furter.

The wife of a best friend of mine is a city girl from the greater Boston area. If you plunked her down in the Sierra wilderness she would freak out with stress. When she visited us once in Maine she firmly believed the small rural town we lived in (complete with neighbors and paved roads) was actually wilderness. Couldn't handle it. I don't think the theory presented would work on her.

Jim

And soon there will be lots of snow: