Feeding birds improves mental health. Free Technical Library News

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Feeding birds improves mental health

15.12.2023

Experts from the Virginia Tech, led by Professor Ashley Dayer, have discovered that feeding birds benefits not only birds, but also humans.

Scientific work confirms that feeding birds not only has a positive effect on their welfare, but can also have a beneficial effect on the psychological well-being of people. Recommendations arising from the study's findings may help improve the quality of interactions between humans and wildlife.

The unique study, launched in 2021, covers more than 10 bird feeders across the United States. It aims to highlight the impact of bird feeding on human welfare, urging policymakers to consider this aspect when making decisions about bird feeding.

Using data from the FeederWatch project, the team aims to establish links between bird behavior, disease, habitat conditions and climate change, and the impact on human well-being.

Professor Dana Hawley, co-author of the study, raised concerns about policy decisions affecting bird feeding and its implications for bird health.

The study also involves people telling scientists how they are feeling, and received more than 8000 comments in the first week. Professor Hawley hopes the findings from this research will help inform recommendations that benefit both wild birds and those who feed them, promoting healthy interactions between humans and nature.

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Emotions differ by complexion 08.04.2018

In fiction, expressions such as "his face turned red with anger" or "he turned pale with fear" are often found. What do we imagine when we read this? A face of the corresponding color distorted by anger or fear - if a person began to blush or turn pale, then emotions are overflowing. A strong emotional shock acts on the blood vessels, so that the change in blood flow in the skin becomes visible to the naked eye. And if emotional experiences are not very strong?

Researchers at Ohio State University decided to take a deeper look at the connection between complexion and emotions. They were interested in how specific color changes depending on what a person feels, and how much this helps us understand how another person feels.

Having collected several hundred photos in which people showed a variety of emotions, they passed them through various color filters - and it turned out that emotions do have certain color codes. That is, if a person, for example, is happy, a characteristic color “print of happiness” will appear on his face: the blood flow will slightly change in the skin around the nose, eyebrows, cheeks, chin and forehead, and these changes will be characteristic of a happy experience. Moreover, such changes do not depend on gender, ethnicity and skin tone. And we are talking about rather complex shades; for example, disgust is characterized by an increase in yellow-blue around the lips and red-green on the forehead and around the nose.

When the color pattern of different emotions was superimposed on faces with a neutral expression and then shown to other people, it turned out that in most cases color changes alone were enough to correctly recognize the emotion. Thus, happiness was correctly determined by color "coloring" in 70% of cases, sadness - in 75%, and anger - in 65% of cases. It is worth adding that not one or two, but eighteen emotions were chosen for the experiment, and among them were both simple (“happiness”, “sadness”, etc.) and complex ones (like “happy surprise” or “ sad anger").

But if the color code of one emotion was superimposed on another emotion (that is, on an inappropriate facial expression - for example, the colors of happiness were combined with an angry face), then it seemed to the participants in the experiment that something was going on with the physiognomy that they were shown, even if they couldn't figure out what it was. The full results of the work are described in the article in PNAS.

The authors of the work even managed to teach a computer to recognize emotions by colors: using a special algorithm, the machine guessed happiness with 88 percent accuracy, anger with 80 percent, fear with 70 percent; the most difficult was disgust mixed with fear - his computer recognized with an accuracy of 65%. Such a program would be very useful for robots that need to communicate with people. On the other hand, many of us ourselves would certainly not refuse a similar device that would help to find out how the interlocutor feels, hiding his emotions from us with all his might.

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