Stress Regulation via Being in Nature and Social Support in Adults, a Meta-analysis

Abstract

In this meta-analysis, the authors investigated whether being in nature and emotional social support are reliable strategies to downregulate stress. We retrieved all the relevant articles that investigated a connection between one of these two strategies and stress. For being in nature we found 54 effects reported in 16 papers (total N = 1,697, MdnN = 52.5), while for emotional social support we found 18 effects reported in 13 papers (total N = 3,787, MdnN = 186). Although we initially found an effect for being in nature and emotional social support on stress (Hedges’ g = -.42; Hedges’ g = -.14, respectively), the effect only held for being in nature after applying our main publication bias correction technique (Hedges’ g = -.60). The emotional social support literature also had a high risk of bias. Although the being-in-nature literature was moderately powered (.72) to detect effects of Cohen’s d = .50 or larger, the risk of bias was considerable, and the reporting contained numerous statistical reporting errors.