Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Beulig, Alfred

Keywords

Resting Heart Rate, Horticultural Therapy, People-Plant Interaction, Psychology, Biology

Area of Concentration

Biology

Abstract

This in-depth physiological study (N = 30) of the people-plant interaction aims to answer some questions and ask many more about the role that various stimuli play in horticultural therapy. Two butterfly gardens, two herb gardens and two water gardens were used in this study to investigate the proposed role of different sensory modalities. The butterfly gardens emphasize visual stimuli, while the herb gardens emphasize olfactory and mechanoreceptive stimuli and the water gardens emphasize auditory stimuli. A wooded area was used as a negative control, although it was found to have similar effects to the experimental gardens in some cases. Although small drops in blood pressure were recorded for all experimental gardens and the wooded area control, these drops were not significantly different from one another (p < 0.073). In other words, the experimental gardens did not lower blood pressure significantly more than the wooded control. Furthermore, while mean heart rate increased slightly in all gardens, this increase was significantly higher in the butterfly garden than in the water garden (p = 0.0155). This disparity suggests that the sound of water may act as a buffer against the increase in heart rate that would be anticipated upon going outside. Therefore, the water garden may be more effective than the butterfly garden at decreasing sympathetic tone. Differences between the gardens at the Bradenton and Sarasota locations indicate variance within a given prototypical garden type which may be the result of small sample size (N = 15) or third variable effects. Finally, there was an overall low level of correlation between the objective physiological data and the subjective interview-based data as determined by a Spearman correlation analysis, with the strongest correlation between heart rate and relaxation being negligible (ρ = -0.2047) and not quite significant (ρ = 0.0503). In other words, there was poor correlation between the objective physiological data and subjective interview-based data.

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