By Yiler Hunag

People in the society nowadays are stressed. In 21 century, stress has become a big health issue for many people. To solve this problem, destressing became a very important topic. There are many ways to destress, and one of the ways is to look at pictures that are relaxing. Researchers found out that different contents in pictures could provide different level of destressing effect, and that would be the key when it comes to making destressing images.

The researchers (Aarti et al., 2014) were doing experiments with images that have different kinds of contents and see how they affect people’s emotions and brain activity. In the experiment, they showed the subjects pictures of terrorisms. It turned out that people had some brain activity going on in their brain. This research presents a general idea of how images are going to affect someone’s emotion. It is reasonable to believe that pictures that include political element are affective when it comes to giving people strong feelings.

Terrorist images are stressing (Powell, 2014)

In another experiment, other researchers (Upali et al., 2012) showed people different kinds of images and observed the activities going on in their amygdala. The researchers made a table with four dimensions. Where the x axis stands for how pleasant the pictures are, and the y axis stands for how exciting the pictures are. This article could help with understanding more about how to control the ratio of different factors in the destressing images. It is possible that exciting images are not very calming when people are looking at them.

The table that categorizes different pictures based how arousal and valence the pictures are. (Upali et al., 2012)

In the third research (Zheng et al., 2016), the researcher found out that the objects that had more sentiment were more outstanding when the pictures were taken in the door, or the objects are man-made. This article presents that including too many man-made object in an images might not help with making the image more relaxing. For example, a machine, a furniture, or a closed room. The result showed that maybe looking at nature would be more destressing than looking at pictures of man-made objects.

Manmade object are stressing to look at. (Mazali, 2020)

Researchers (Mathew P, 2013) got the result of “A considerable body of research has demonstrated that natural environments can help restore cognitive and emotional resources depleted by modern urban living.”, but didn't mention the reason. This brought up another question: is there a difference between looking at nature in real life and looking at pictures of nature. In order to make the destressing images more affective, this piece of information would be necessary. With these informations, we could make better images that are destressing. When that happened, there would be less stressed people in the world.

Is looking at pictures of nature destressing? (Dockrill, 2016)

Iyer, A., Webster, J., Hornsey, M. J., & Vanman, E. J. (2014). Understanding the power of the picture: The effect of image content on emotional and political responses to terrorism: Responses to images of terrorism. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 44(7), 511–521. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12243

Nanda, U., Zhu, X., & Jansen, B. (2012). Image and Emotion: From Outcomes to Brain Behavior. HERD, 5, 40–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/193758671200500404

Zheng, H., Chen, T., & Luo, J. (2016). When Saliency Meets Sentiment: Understanding How Image Content Invokes Emotion and Sentiment (arXiv:1611.04636). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04636

White, M. P., Pahl, S., Ashbullby, K., Herbert, S., & Depledge, M. H. (2013). Feelings of restoration from recent nature visits. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 35, 40–51. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494413000224

Dockrill, P. (2016, March 23). Just Looking at Photos of Nature Could Be Enough to Lower Your Work Stress Levels. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/just-looking-at-photos-of-nature-could-be-enough-to-lower-your-work-stress-levels

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Powell, J. (2014, October 7). How to talk to terrorists. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/07/-sp-how-to-talk-to-terrorists-isis-al-qaida