North Carolina [US], Birdwatching may be an option for college students looking to improve their mental health. According to a recent study, people who have nature-based experiences report higher levels of well-being and lower levels of psychological distress than those who do not. No. Birdwatching, in particular, produced euphoric effects with larger gains in subjective well-being and greater reductions in distress than simple nature exposure such as walks. Since birdwatching is a simple sport, the findings are positive for college students, who are among the people most likely to suffer from mental health problems.“There has been a lot of research coming out about well-being during the pandemic that suggests teens and college-aged children are struggling the most,” said the study's corresponding author and professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University. Professor Nils Petersen said, "Especially when you think about students and graduate students, it seems like these are the groups that are struggling to have access to nature and to get those benefits." Wildlife is one of the ubiquitous ways that humans interact with wildlife globally, and college campuses provide a place where even more urban settings have access to that activity. To quantitatively measure subjective well-being, researchers used a five-question survey, known as the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). The tool asks participants to give a rating of zero to five for statements about well-being, depending on how often they have felt that way over the past two weeks.For example, when prompted “I felt calm and relaxed,” a participant would mark a zero for “any time” or a five for “all the time.” Researchers can calculate a raw well-being score by simply adding up the five responses, with zero being the worst possible and 25 being the best possible quality of life. Researchers divided participants into three groups: a control group, a group that received five Nature walks are assigned and one group is assigned five 30-minute birdwatching sessions. While all three groups had improved WHO-5 scores, the birdwatching group started lower and ended higher than the other two. Using the STOP-D, a similar questionnaire designed to measure psychological distress, researchers also found that nature engagement outperformed controls in reducing distress in both bird watching and nature walking participants. The decline observed, Peterson said, makes this study different from some previous research. that I compared the effects of birdwatching and nature engagement to a control group rather than a group that more actively experienced negative situations "One of the studies we reviewed in our paper compared people who listened to birds Compared to people who hear traffic noises, and that's not really a neutral comparison," Peterson said."We had a neutral control where we left people alone and compared it to something positive. The study supports the idea that birdwatching helps improve mental health and opens up several avenues for future research. For example, future studies may explore why birdwatching helps people feel better or whether race, gender and other factors have a moderating effect, says the paper, "Birdwatching Linked to Enhanced Psychological Well-Being on College Campuses: A Pilot-Scale Experimental Study," is published in Environmental Psychology. Co-authors include Lincoln Larson. Aaron Hipp, Justin M. Beal Katherine LeRose, Hannah DesRochers, Summer Lauder, Sofia Torres, Nathan A. Tarr, Kayla Stukes, Katherine Stevenson and Katherine L. Martin, all from Ann State.