Psychophysiological Benefits of Healing Garden: The Effects of Waterscape

• Main Authors: Shiue-Yu Fu, 傅學俞
• Other Authors: Chang-Chan Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pb744n

碩士 === 東海大學 === 景觀學系 === 101 === Previous studies have shown that contacting natural environment and landscape will promote people’s health. People can get to a sound state and patients can get the chance of rehabilitation when they perceive positive physiological and psychological benefits from being in the natural environment and landscape. Literatures also showed that healing gardens and therapeutic landscape surrounding the hospitals have positive effects on user’s psychophysiological benefits. Moreover, some researchers found that people can perceive more psychophysiological benefits in waterscapes than in those landscapes without water. The other researchers, however, found there is no difference between waterscapes and the other landscapes regarding their effects on people’s perception of psychophysiological benefits. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the perceived psychophysiological benefits of users in the hospital outdoor space who were stimulated by waterscape. Two gardens in front of the Outpatient Building at Taichung Veterans General Hospital (abbreviated as TVGH) were selected as study sites. The subjects were drawn from the users within the two sites using a convenient sampling technique and 395 valid subjects were obtained. For each site, three photos were used as stimulating media which include the current garden, the simulated healing garden without waterscape, and the simulated healing garden with waterscape. The three photos were presented in a random order to each subject and a self-administered questionnaire was used to measure the subject’s perception of psycho-physiological benefits after viewing each of the three photos. One-factor within-subjects ANOVA was used to test the research hypotheses. It was found that the healing garden with waterscape has the highest effect on the users’ perception of physiological benefits and emotion relief benefits, followed by the healing garden without waterscape. The current garden has the lowest effect. The perception of pressure relief benefits was higher for both the healing gardens with and without waterscape than for the current garden. There is no significant difference between the healing garden with waterscape and the one without waterscape in regard to the perception of pressure relief benefits. Based on the findings, it was suggested that a healing garden with waterscape should be preferred for the hospital outdoor space design in order to best improve the perception of psychophysiological benefits for users including patients, the families, and medical staff. It was also suggested that researchers can further investigate the difference among various types of waterscape (i.e., static, flowing, falling, and jet) regarding the effects on users’ perception of psychophysiological benefits in future studies.