Study investigates the influence of birdsong on mood, paranoia, and cognition
When you next hear cheerful twittering of birds,
you should stop and listen. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute
for Human Development and the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
have shown that birdsong reduces anxiety and irrational thoughts. Their
findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Birdsong could be used to prevent mental illness.
© Claus H Godbersen / Unsplash
In the study, the researchers examined how traffic noise and birdsong
affect mood, paranoia, and cognitive functioning by carrying out a
randomized online experiment with 295 participants. These heard six
minutes of either typical traffic noise or birdsong with varying numbers
of different traffic sounds or birdsongs. Before and after hearing the
sound clips, the participants filled in questionnaires assessing their
mental health and performed cognitive tests. „Everyone has certain
psychological dispositions. Healthy people can also experience anxious
thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions. The questionnaires enable us
to identify people's tendencies without their having a diagnosis of
depression, anxiety, and paranoia and to investigate the effect of the
sounds of birds or traffic on these tendencies,“ says first author Emil
Stobbe, Predoctoral Fellow at the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental
Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
The
present study suggests that listening to birdsong reduces anxiety and
paranoia in healthy participants. Birdsong did not appear to have an
influence on depressive states in this experiment. Traffic noise,
however, generally worsened depressive states, especially if the audio
clip involved many different kinds of traffic sounds. The positive
influence of birdsong on mood is already known, but to the best of the
authors‘ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal an effect on
paranoid states. This was independent of whether the birdsong came from
two or more different bird species.The researchers also found that
neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance.
In
the researchers‘ view, the explanation for these effects is that
birdsong is a subtle indication of an intact natural environment,
detracting attention from stressors that could otherwise signal an acute
threat. Taken together, the results suggest interesting avenues for
further research and applications, such as the active manipulation of
background noise in different situations or the examination of its
influence on patients with diagnosed anxiety disorders or paranoia.
„Birdsong
could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an
audio CD would be a simple, easily accessible intervention. But if we
could already show such effects in an online experiment performed by
participants on a computer, we can assume that these are even stronger
outdoors in nature,“ says Stobbe. He is a member of the Lise Meitner
Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Development in Berlin, which studies the effects of the physical
environment on the individual. „We were recently able to perform a study
showing that a one-hour walk in nature reduces brain activity
associated with stress,“ adds the research group’s head Simone Kühn. „We
cannot say yet which features of nature – smells, sounds, color, or a
combination thereof – are responsible for the effect. The present study
provides a further building block to clarify this issue,“ continues
Kühn. What is clear is that nature improves mental health and
well-being. So, out we go!