It’s well known that time spent in nature makes us happy, but there are a growing number of interesting ways to measure just how much.  A study a few years ago used our Flickr photos (the use of Flickr does date the study somewhat!) to gauge just how happy natural parks were making people.

A slightly more up to date version of the same kind of research was recently performed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  They used big data analyses of social network data to track the mental satisfaction of visitors to urban forests..

Just as with the Flickr-based research, the Chinese team wanted to improve upon the traditional, questionnaire-based method of tracking the happiness of nature visitors.  They selected three urban forests in three major cities in Northeast China as their locations for data collection.

The researchers collected data from the Sina Weibo social media platform, which frequently features selfies posted by its users.  The images were tagged with geo-data, to allow for their location to be tracked, and each was posted during the National Day holiday in 2017.

The team utilized facial recognition software that had been trained to recognize Asian faces and assign them scores for up to eight different facial expressions.  They gathered just under 1,000 faces, which between them had 7,480 different scores for facial expressions.

The analysis revealed that visitors appeared happiest when the urban park was furthest away from the downtown area of the city, with female visitors typically more inclined to show happy emotions in such a setting.

The fact that such data-driven analyses are still somewhat rare, despite the original Flickr-based study being conducted in 2013 perhaps highlights the limitations of the method, but it’s perhaps interesting nonetheless.