What can virtual reality teach us about nature’s restorative health benefits?

Well-curated spaces with natural elements can create an ‘aroused fascination,’ says Drexel study in partnership with Longwood Gardens

Drexel University

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Some of nature’s healthful benefits might be possible through well-curated ornamental spaces, suggests a brain activity study recently published in the October issue of Building and Environment from researchers at Drexel’s Nick Howley College of Engineering and Computing. The findings, which reveal new insights into how humans experience nature, may lead to scalable, evidence-based ways to design spaces to produce restorative benefits, which could be especially helpful for those who do not have convenient access to plants outdoors.

In the study, 32 adults experienced five immersive, 360-degree virtual reality experiences developed in partnership with Longwood Gardens and inspired by real settings available at the 1,100-acre horticultural destination in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Nick Jushchyshyn, an associate professor and program director in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, and his team in the College’s Digital Media program created the VR environments: a non-horticultural control (an indoor office-like room with no natural elements), ornamental gardens (modeled after Longwood’s highly curated Italian Water Garden and Main Conservatory) and natural landscapes (Inspired by Longwood’s Forest Walk and Meadow Garden, which feature relatively minimal human management).

Participants spent six minutes exploring the sights and sounds of each site. While they navigated the virtual environments, their brain and body responses were recorded through and array of sensors.

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, sensor worn on the forehead that tracked changes in blood oxygenation in the prefrontal cortex. A wristband sensor recorded heart rate, heart rate variability and electrodermal activity — the small changes in skin conductance that reflect nervous system arousal. Together, the data collected by the sensors gave insight into how hard the brain is working in each setting, as well as the level of alertness or engagement a person may be experiencing.

Participants were also surveyed after each VR experience, to assess their appreciation of the beauty within the activity and whether they felt restorative effects.

“Our study shows that these curated green spaces evoke distinct physiological responses and not a simple positive or negative one,” said senior author Hasan Ayaz, PhD, a professor in the Howley College of Engineering and Computing’s School of Biomedical Engineering and Science. “Researchers and developers need to consider many aspects of brain responses to really understand how humans process exposures to natural elements.”

Most notably, the authors highlighted the responses to the ornamental gardens. The fNIRS sensor data showed that the gardens reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex to nearly the same degree as the natural landscapes, a brain activity pattern associated with restoration.

At the same time, the wristband sensor recorded higher electrodermal activity (small changes in skin sweat) among participants viewing the gardens by comparison to the office setting, indicating heightened physiological arousal. That combination of a “quieter” brain and a more alert body occurred even though participants rated the gardens as restorative.

“The ornamental condition was not simply a mid-point between the other two experiences, but a style worth understanding in its own right, particularly for developers, planners and researchers,” said Ayaz. “We found that these ornamental, curated spaces can quiet the mind almost on par with relatively untouched nature, while also providing the benefit of elevated bodily activation, a condition we refer to as an ‘aroused fascination.’”

The team hopes the findings can be used to develop real-world and virtual ornamental spaces that incorporate elements of nature and built environments to be restorative for the brain and body while also being engaging.

“We expected the gardens to fall somewhere between the plain indoor room and the wild landscapes, but that isn’t what the body showed,” said lead author Kevin L. Ramirez-Chavez, a doctoral researcher in Ayaz’s lab. “The ornamental gardens calmed the brain much like the natural scenes did, yet at the same time they put the body on higher alert. That combination showed us that we were looking at a distinct kind of environment, not just a midpoint on a scale from built to natural. By mapping these distinct responses, this work lays the groundwork for eventually designing targeted VR breaks that could help relieve cognitive fatigue among people stuck in windowless spaces.”

As the team expected, the plain office environment was associated with higher activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region linked to internally focused, self-referential thinking. The authors suggest this may reflect the brain turning inward when there is little in the surroundings to engage with. The natural setting was rated as the most restorative, and sensors showed it was less taxing on the brain and nervous system than the office setting.

The health benefits from exposure to nature are well-documented, yet humans are not spending much time there, including less than 10% of their time outdoors, according to the National Human Activity Pattern Survey and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. This “nature deficit,” has been linked to affective disorders, chronic stress and attentional fatigue. Studies have cited many reasons for humans’ lack of activity in nature, including resources and climate change, but one of the most often cited is increasing use of technology.

The Drexel study did not capture every element of nature, such as smell, airflow and temperature, which may limit how broadly the findings apply. The authors say future studies that incorporate tasks to measure brain performance and attention, and different environmental properties, such as layout and complexity, would help pinpoint what drives brain and nervous system responses.

The study brought together experts from across Drexel, including the School of Biomedical Engineering and Science, LeBow College of Business, and Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.

In addition to Ayaz, Jushchyshyn and Ramirez-Chavez, Adrian Curtin, Felix Maldonado Osorio, and Rajneesh Suri, all from Drexel University, also contributed. Ayaz has a relationship with fNIR Devices, LLC that includes equity.

Read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360132326008085

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Journal

Building and Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.buildenv.2026.115004

Method of Research

Observational study

Article Title

Distinct prefrontal, autonomic, and subjective responses to built, ornamental, and natural virtual environments

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2026

COI Statement

Hasan Ayaz reports a relationship with fNIR Devices, LLC that includes equity.

 

Study of 38K+ songs finds lyrics are losing feeling

Michigan State University

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MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request.

EAST LANSING, Mich. – New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships — both across generations of artists and within artists’ careers.

The study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, is the largest of its kind to analyze song lyrics. The final dataset includes 38,467 songs from 230 artists spanning close to a century of popular music from 1947 to 2024. Discographies were manually checked by a team of roughly 30 research assistants after the initial lyric collection.

“A lot of previous work has asked whether music changes across decades, but much less has examined whether the same artists change across the course of their careers,” said Jan Brascamp, co-author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “By looking at both at once, we can begin separating changes that happen within artists from broader shifts in culture and the music industry.”

The study found that lyrics became less emotional and less socially focused over time. Within artists’ careers, both positive and negative words declined, as did references to family and friends. Specific shifts show that anxiety-related language increased while sadness declined in lyrics.

The researchers found similar historical patterns when comparing artists from different eras. These broader historical differences were generally larger than the changes that occurred within individual artists’ careers.

Of the 230 artists, Willie Nelson had the greatest number of songs while Miles Davis had the fewest with lyrics. Classic soul and early rock artists, like Marvin Gaye and The Supremes, tended to rank highly on positive emotion and social references, whereas artists more countercultural genres, like Nine Inch Nails and Sex Pistols, often appear at the lower ends. Negative- and sadness-related categories are disproportionately represented by older country and blues artists, like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.

The researchers were surprised to find that song lyrics do not map neatly onto ordinary psychological aging.

“People often become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they age, so we might expect that lyrics become more positive or relational across an artists’ career,” said Logan Gibson, lead-author and MSU research associate. “Instead, positive emotions and social references declined. That suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural or industry-level forces.”

The researchers hope this study shows how large collections of everyday cultural products from songs, books, social media and films can be used to study how people express emotion and how relationships change over time.

“Music is not just entertainment. People use songs to regulate their emotions, understand themselves, develop their identities and feel connected to other people. That makes lyrics an interesting record of what artists — and potentially the audiences and cultures around them — are choosing to talk about,” said William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “So, when we see large-scale declines in emotional and social language, it raises interesting questions about whether the way we express feelings and relationships has changed more broadly.”

By Shelly DeJong

Read on MSUToday.

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Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 170 years. Among the world’s top 100 universities and a leading U.S. public research institution, MSU pushes the limits of discovery and innovation to advance the state of Michigan and the nation, and make a better, safer, healthier world for all. The university provides life-changing educational opportunities through an inclusive academic community with more than 400 programs of study and is the largest producer of talent for Michigan, educating more undergraduates than any other university in the state.

For MSU news on the web, go to MSUToday or x.com/MSUnews.

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Journal

Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts

DOI

10.1037/aca0000905

Article Title

Changes in social and emotional content in song lyrics across popular artists’ discographies.

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2026

 

Having insurance doesn’t mean you can get a mental health appointment in U.S.

Study uncovers widespread problems with provider directories

Ohio State University

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Americans with commercial insurance are generally told they have access to a strong network of mental health providers. But when researchers called providers listed in those networks, securing an appointment was usually difficult or impossible, according to a new study.

Researchers, posed as “secret shoppers” looking for appointments for issues including anxiety and grief, called 5,822 psychiatrists and psychologists on commercial provider lists in five states — Delaware, Montana, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia.

Their aim was to test whether the provider information in insurance directories actually connected patients with available, in-network mental health professionals.

A successful call (meaning someone picked up the phone) resulted in an appointment with the health care provider only 24% of the time. If the caller was willing to see another clinician, an appointment could be made 31% of the time.

The research, led by Simon Haeder and Wendy Xu of The Ohio State University College of Public Health, appears today in JAMA Health Forum.

“Access to mental health care in the U.S. is a well-documented struggle. This shows that even those with private insurance, who are told they have many providers to choose from, can have a hard time getting the care they need,” Haeder said.

The researchers couldn’t analyze more than 6 in 10 calls because they reached an automated system or answering machine and could not speak with a person.

When analyzing the remaining 2,252 calls, Haeder and his colleagues found:

• 56% revealed inaccurate information in the provider directory.
• 22% of calls didn’t result in an appointment because of capacity limitations, including providers not accepting new patients.
• Callers were told they’d have to wait an average of 20.5 days for care, with longer waits for psychiatry than psychology.

“Providers move, change phone numbers, leave practices or otherwise become unavailable, but those changes aren’t always reflected in insurance directories,” Haeder said.

Insurers may also list clinicians who are part of a contracted group even when those individual clinicians aren’t actually available. Researchers describe these as “ghost” providers or networks because they appear to exist on paper but aren’t necessarily accessible to patients.

“Our study speaks to a broader problem in American healthcare: the disconnect between having health insurance and actually being able to use it,” said Xu, an Ohio State professor of health services management and policy.

“Inaccurate provider directories are not simply an administrative inconvenience. They can create substantial barriers to care, leaving people effectively underinsured despite having insurance.”

Challenges with provider network directories have been documented across healthcare and are especially worrisome when it comes to people looking for help with mental health concerns, the researchers said.

“Seeking help can already be difficult for someone experiencing anxiety, grief or another mental health concern, and that’s exacerbated when they’re running into answering machines, unavailable providers and ‘in-network’ psychologists who’ve moved to another state,” Haeder said.

Provider-directory accuracy is a longstanding, systemic problem across specialties, with its roots in several challenges, including inconsistent regulation and enforcement and incentives for insurers to beef up provider lists, he said.

“I’d love to see a centralized provider directory that clinicians maintain and insurers can access, rather than every insurer separately trying to maintain its own database,” Haeder said.

The study received funding from Inseparable, a national mental health advocacy organization.

Other researchers who worked on the study are Ohio State doctoral student Yuqin Lou and Benjamin Miller of Stanford University.

#

CONTACTS: Simon Haeder, Haeder.1@osu.edu; Wendy Xu, Xu.1636@osu.edu

Written by Misti Crane, Crane.11@osu.edu; 614-292-3739

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Journal

JAMA Health Forum

DOI

10.1001/jamahealthforum.2026.3746

Article Title

Mental Health Ghost Networks in Commercial Insurance Plans

Article Publication Date

16-Oct-2026

Scaling perinatal mental-health care: CDI scientists assess home visiting programs in Midwest

Hackensack Meridian Health

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image: 

Elissa Z. Faro, Ph.D., an implementation scientist and medical anthropologist at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), alongside co-principal investigator Kelli Ryckman, Ph.D., associate dean of Research at Indiana University School of Public Health - Bloomington, led a team investigating the effe tiveness of home mental health visits in the Midwest. The results appear now in the journal BMC Health Services Research. 

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Credit: Hackensack Meridian Health

Can reaching out to new mothers right at the outset of parenting set them on the right path from the start? 

A new study published in BMC Health Services Research assesses a program of home health visitation programs, which provide perinatal mental health services for mothers and families who might not otherwise have access to such resources. 

The study details a community-engaged formative evaluation designed to scale the "Mothers and Babies" cognitive-behavioral intervention within state home visiting programs across Iowa and Indiana. The investigation was led by Elissa Z. Faro, Ph.D., an implementation scientist and medical anthropologist at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), alongside co-principal investigator Kelli Ryckman, Ph.D., associate dean of Research at Indiana University School of Public Health - Bloomington.

Perinatal depression and anxiety are common and potentially serious complications of pregnancy and childbirth, directly contributing to maternal mortality and persistent health disparities, particularly among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) populations. 

Home visiting programs (HVPs) are a vital community health link already reaching thousands of low-income and marginalized families annually. But delivering evidence-based mental health interventions from these HVPs—which vary in operations, staffing, and funding—poses implementation challenges.

The researchers consequently launched a multi-faceted investigation as part of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded IMPACT (Implementing Mental Health Programs Across Communities in Iowa & Indiana) trial. Using a modified Implementation Mapping approach, the team partnered with healthcare providers, state agency representatives, and program recipients to adapt an implementation facilitation strategy.

The researchers mapped more than 500 programs across Indiana and Iowa. A survey of 72 of these HVPs demonstrated that over 90 percent of responding programs routinely screen for perinatal depression - only further emphasizing the need for structured, evidence-based intervention tools during home visits.

Interviews with participants reached in the program identified key engagement barriers, including fear of judgment, scheduling logistics, and the importance of involving broader social networks and family connections.

In-person meetings held in Des Moines and Indianapolis brought together home visitors, supervisors, program directors, social workers, and state health department officials to understand and prioritize social determinant factors in outreach.

Virtual panel meetings conducted in English and Spanish further connected the outreach to the groups.

The formative evaluation revealed key differences in state priorities: Indiana emphasized logistical challenges such as staff workload and integration into existing workflows, while Iowa participants homed in on the importance of communication systems, training infrastructure, and mental-health consultations.

Altogether, the research group produced the IMPACT Implementation Support Package, structured around four core performance outcomes: profession development and staff growth through ongoing skill development, integration into system of implementation, better staff understanding of mental health, and the ongoing building of trust and rapport among clients and client groups.

These findings emphasize the need to reach out to mothers who need a helping hand - and ear - at a critical start of their parenting experience.

“The findings from this study carry important implications for health service delivery and policy,” the authors write. 

Faro’s leadership on the IMPACT study highlights the unique interdisciplinary expertise she brings to the CDI. An archaeologist by training with a doctorate in classical art and archaeology from the University of Michigan, her early academic work focused on understanding complex human systems and recovering the perspectives of individuals omitted from dominant historical narratives.

By merging community engagement, implementation science, and health equity, Faro and her colleagues are working to ensure that evidence-based perinatal mental health support reaches the families who need it most.

 

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Journal

BMC Health Services Research

DOI

10.1186/s12913-026-15768-5

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Adapting implementation facilitation to scale evidence-based perinatal mental health services in home visiting programs: a community and partner-engaged formative evaluation across Iowa and Indiana

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2026

 

Chicago Journals becomes first publisher to offer free journal access to Tribal Colleges and Universities

University of Chicago Press Journals

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In early 2026, the University of Chicago Press Journals Division became the first publisher to offer free journal access to Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) in the United States through a partnership with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). The initiative provides no-cost digital subscriptions to every journal in our program, ensuring our new and archival scholarship is available to the students and faculty served by these often-underfunded institutions.

AIHEC includes 37 TCUs that were created and chartered by their own Tribal government or the federal government to provide higher education opportunities to American Indians through programs that are locally based, holistic, and supportive. So far, we have provisioned access to more than ten institutions, and we are working with AIHEC as additional institutions opt in. This new program is an exceptional opportunity to build productive and collaborative relationships with institutions we were not previously reaching. Learn more about the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

 

Researchers advance aquifer mapping using remote sensing and statistical models to improve groundwater management

University of Texas at Austin

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image: 

A conceptual figure from the study showing how researchers used InSAR deformation data to create a permeability map of the aquifer after about 6 months of groundwater pumping. The bottom layer is InSAR deformation data from remote sensing satellites laid over Google Earth images of the aquifer site. The middle layer is the inferred permeability map created using the Bayesian inversion framework. The top layer shows a view of vertical deformation experienced in the aquifer based on the permeability map, with peaks exaggerated to highlight changes.

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Credit: Alghamdi et al

Groundwater in many areas of the U.S. and across the globe is being depleted as pumping for drinking water and agriculture outpace nature’s ability to refill aquifers. In the most severe cases this could lead to a point of no return, where an aquifer’s physical structure collapses and it cannot be refilled.

But a new method of mapping aquifers could provide a better tool for managing them.

In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin used remote sensing data and statistical methods to map a municipal aquifer in Nevada. Their goal is to create a lower-cost method to measure an aquifer’s permeability, how easily water flows through rock, that could aid groundwater management.

“We think this is a really promising technique for aquifer characterization and management that could be tremendously useful and essentially free,” said co-author Marc Hesse, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences and affiliated faculty member at UT’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

When water is pumped out of an aquifer it changes the pressure underground, which can cause the ground overlaying an aquifer to sink subtly, a few millimeters to a few centimeters over months. The study’s lead author Amal Alghamdi, who conducted the research while earning a doctorate at the Oden Institute, said that this sinking contains information about the subsurface geology of the aquifer.

“The exciting question was how much we could work backward from that surface response to learn about what we cannot directly see underground,” said Alghamdi, who is now an assistant professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals.

Ground subsidence can be measured in different ways. In the study, the researchers used publicly available InSAR satellite data and a statistical method based on a Bayesian inference algorithm developed by co-author Professor Omar Ghattas’ research group at the Oden Institute. They used the information to create a 3D model of how water is likely to flow and spread laterally in the aquifer. By using freely available satellite observations they mapped a range of possible permeability fields.

The Jackson School research builds on a study conducted by a different research group that calculated the overall hydraulic conductivity of the same Nevada aquifer using subsidence data from GPS monitors. While that research offered a single overall reading of the aquifer’s hydraulic conductivity, a measure that’s related to permeability, the spatial variations in the Jackson School’s maps provide a more detailed view of how permeability changes in different places across the aquifer.

Understanding permeability gives water managers insight into how the water is flowing underground and can help them sustainably manage an aquifer.

These maps highlighted variations in permeability throughout the aquifer, including revealing a high permeability channel on the southern end of the aquifer and an area of low permeability that previous research has hypothesized as a geologic fault.

In addition, the research also compared permeability maps generated using GPS data from the earlier study, InSAR data, and a combination of the two. They found that high resolution data from a single InSAR map provided more detailed and accurate information than multiple GPS readings over time, at least at this location.

Last year, NASA launched the new NISAR satellite with the Indian Space Research Organization to monitor Earth’s land and water processes, including vegetation change, sea level variation and groundwater movement. Co-author Jingyi “Ann” Chen, associate professor at UT’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, said that this data can be used to track subsidence due to aquifer pumping and make inferences about permeability and potentially other characteristics of the ground below.

“It’s exciting because that NISAR satellite operates at a short 12-day repeat cycle and longer wavelengths that can peer through plant cover,” Chen said. “This allows us to retrieve deformation measurements with greatly improved quality over agricultural basins that rely heavily on groundwater pumping.”

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Journal

Geophysical Research Letters

DOI

10.1029/2025GL117023

Article Title

Advancing Aquifer Characterization Through the Integration of Satellite Geodesy, Geomechanics, and Bayesian Inference