You don ’t have to climb a mountain for a “peak experience” in nature to be life-changing

By Emma Young We’re all familiar with the idea that nature can be psychologically uplifting. But for some people, a single, brief “peak experience” in a natural setting, lasting mere seconds or minutes, changes their view of themselves or their relationships with others so profoundly that their lives are positively transformed as a result. A new study in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology explores exactly how and why this happens. The researchers LIa Naor and Ofra Mayseless at the University of Haifa, Israel, advertised on the internet for people who felt they’d had a transformative experience in nature to get in touch for an interview. “It was not difficult to find participants; in fact many people replied and were eager to share their experience,” they wrote. The volunteers – five men and ten women, aged 28 to 70 – came from a range of lifestyles, from farms, cities and communal settlements, and different countries, including Argentina, America and Israel. Naor asked them to describe their transformative experience in detail, and to focus on their perceptions and interpretations of what happened. While all participants said they’d had a profound experience in nature, for three participants, it was not life-changing. Naor and Mayseless contrasted these three with the others to tease out four factors that seemed to be important for a transformation to happen. First, the natural setting reflected and even embodied a lifelong, significant and challenging ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: environmental Personality Qualitative Source Type: blogs