Indoor horticultural activities reduced stress in Chinese children after timed math activitiesResearch has linked horticultural therapy to health and well-being. However, studies haven’t compared how different types of horticultural therapy help children recover from stressful events. This experiment tested the stress recovery benefits of five indoor horticultural activities: flower arrangement, sowing and transplanting seeds, <em>kokedama</em> crafting, pressed flower card making, and decorative bottle painting with dried flowers. The researchers collected physiological and psychological data from Chinese children (age 9-12) in an afterschool program before and after a short math test to document physiological and psychological changes associated with the stressor and five different horticultural interventions. The goal was to understand how different horticultural activities affected children’s physiological, emotional, and affective health following a stressor.
This was a quasi-experimental study with 48 Chinese elementary school students set in a multi-purpose classroom after school. Participating children enrolled in a six-day horticultural course. Each session began with a 15-20 minute horticultural knowledge session followed by the experimental procedure. For the experiment, researchers helped children put on physiological monitoring equipment. After a 3-minute baseline reading, children were administered a 10-minute math test with a countdown timer designed to induce stress. At the end of the test, children completed a standardized instrument to measure positive and negative affect. For the next 20 minutes, students then completed one of the five horticultural therapy activities or a writing activity individually. Researchers then removed the monitoring equipment and re-administered the positive and negative affect questionnaire a second time. Physiological measures included electrocardiogram and electrocephalography data, such as heart rate and nervous system numbers which indicate stress and relaxation. The psychological instruments had children rate themselves for 15 different emotion words and also identify their emotions with nine different picture prompts. Negative and positive emotions measured included pleasure, arousal, joy, confidence, etc. The researchers then used statistics to measure physiological and psychological changes before and after each experimental condition and compare them with measures for children who completed a writing activity instead of a horticultural intervention. Statistical tests also compared differences in pre- and post-intervention measures for children assigned to flower arrangement, sowing and transplanting seeds, <em>kokedama</em> crafting, pressed flower card making, and decorative bottle paining with dried flowers.
Data analysis determined that the timed math test effectively raised physiological measures of children’s stress levels. For the <em>physiological</em> measures, the horticultural activities slightly outperformed the writing activity, except for the electrocephalographic indicators; however, the horticultural activities did not differ significantly with each other in their stress recovery benefits. Better scores for sowing and transplanting seeds and flower arrangement were not statistically significant. Physiological measures also varied within each activity by time phase with no overarching rule governing this fluctuation. For heart rate measures, girls benefited from horticultural activities more than boys by 3.68%. For the <em>psychological </em>measures, the horticultural activities increased positive affect and decreased negative effect. Results showed that children’s positive affect varied by activity with flower arranging the best activity for improving children’s affect. Some measures varied by students’ prior experiences with horticultural activities. For example, students with prior horticultural experience had better physiological recovery from stress with flower arrangement and <em>kokedama</em> crafting. Students believed that participating in horticultural activities increased their confidence.
Overall, these findings suggest that 20 minutes of horticultural therapy had some benefits for children after short, stress-inducing math activities. Thus, this study provides evidence that children also can benefit from horticultural interventions. However, the study failed to identify significant and consistent differences in the stress-reducing potential of specific horticultural activities. Most comparisons between horticultural activities yielded inconsistent, statistically insignificant, or contradictory results. Psychological measures showed the students preferred the only two horticultural activities which included live plants and seeds. However, the authors did not question their decision to conduct horticultural activities indoors in a controlled environment that sealed children off from natural light or air—which they did to prevent the outdoor environment from affecting their results.
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