It is well known that nature is beneficial to health. Contact with her can reduce the stress of everyday life and serve as a refuge. Now, a study has investigated the influence of birdsong on mood, paranoia, and cognition, and has concluded that birdsong is good for mental health.
In the trial, from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Tübingen, Germany, the researchers examined how traffic noise and birdsong affect mood by performing a Online randomized experiment with 295 participants. They listened to six minutes of typical traffic noise or birdsong with a variable number of different traffic sounds or birdsongs.
Before and after listening to the sound clips, the participants completed questionnaires to assess their mental health and took cognitive tests. “Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people may also experience temporary anxious thoughts or paranoid perceptions. The questionnaires allowed us identify people trends without having a diagnosis of depression, anxiety and paranoia and to investigate the effect of these sounds,” explained first author Emil Stobbe from the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
This study, published in Nature, suggests that listening to birdsong reduces anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants. Birdsong did not appear to influence depressive states in this experiment. Nevertheless, traffic noise generally worsened depressive states, especially if the audio clip included many different types of traffic sounds.
The positive influence of birdsong on mood is already known, but to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal an effect on paranoid states. This was independent of whether the birdsong came from two or more different bird species. The researchers also found that neither bird song nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance.
In the researchers’ view, the explanation for these effects is that birdsong is a subtle indication of an intact natural environment, diverting attention from stressors that might otherwise indicate emotional threat. Taken together, the results suggest interesting avenues for future research and applications, such as the active manipulation of background noise in different situations or the examination of its influence in patients with diagnosed anxiety disorders or paranoia.
Prevent mental disorders
“Bird song could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an audio CD would be a simple and easily accessible intervention. But if we could already show such effects in an online experiment conducted by the participants on a computer, we can assume that these are even stronger outdoors in nature», says Stobbe, who studies the effects of the physical environment on the individual.
“We were recently able to carry out a study showing that an hour’s walk in nature reduces stress-associated brain activity,” adds the head of the research group, Simone Kühn.
“We still can’t say what features of nature (smells, sounds, colors or a combination of them) are responsible for the effect. The present study provides an additional component to clarify this problem”, concludes the researcher.