Cooperation in Nature: A nature-based intervention improves collaboration and creativity

Data for manuscript titled "Cooperation in Nature: Nature-based intervention improves mood, creativity, collaboration, and interpersonal affiliation" Abstract: As urbanization accelerates, the cognitive effects of exposure to manmade environments and decreased time in nature become increasingly important to understand. The current study investigates the effects of real-world outdoor exposure versus simulated office-based activities on verbal creativity, mood, and collaboration. Office workers engaged in workplace collaboration either outdoors in nature or indoors in an office setting. Measures of individual affect and verbal creativity were also administered before and after a period of exposure to the assessed environments. The outdoor group showed lower self-reported negative emotions and demonstrated increased performance in one of our two verbal creativity measures. Moreover, groups exposed to nature demonstrated greater satisfaction with their collective problem-solving solutions and with the degree of influence they felt they had during the group discussions, as compared to their indoor counterparts. The current research design and results address multiple components of the Tetrahedal Model, specifically the vertices of materials, participants, contexts, and outcomes. Within the vertex of materials, this study contributes to nature-based research focused on real-world, immersive environments. This study utilizes working adult participants within the context of work-related collaboration. Finally, our findings extend Attention Restoration Theory to include other prefrontal cortex (PFC) processes, such as sensitivity to emotions, verbal creativity, and social cognition.