Nature Videos Help To Calm Inmates In Solitary Confinement

In the experiment, researchers found that prisoners who watched videos with nature scenes felt less stressed and weren’t as violent as those who didn’t. The team, led by ecologist Nalini Nadkarni at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, published their findings on 1 September in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Calming influence

Past research has shown that regularly seeing plants — even from a window — can improve hospital patients’ and prison inmates’ physical and mental health. Nadkarni went further by studying people in solitary confinement, where inmates typically spend 23 hours a day alone in bare-walled cells.

Her team divided inmates at the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon, into 2 groups of 24. Those in one group could choose to exercise or, up to five times per week, go to a 'blue room' to watch 45-minute-long videos showing natural scenes such as mountains, forests and oceans. Those in the other group were offered exercise, but no videos.

The researchers and prison staff measured inmates’ moods and stress levels, and tracked violent incidents over a year. They found that inmates who had access to videos reported feeling calmer and were involved in 26% fewer violent incidents. The results suggest that nature imagery can help even society’s most nature-deprived populations, which includes prison inmates, but also residents of nursing homes and inner city areas, says Nadkarni.

You may read the entire article on Nature.com here:  http://www.nature.com/news/nature-videos-help-to-calm-inmates-in-solitary-confinement-1.22540