Play sounds of nature music7/6/2023 To this end, this study aimed to investigate the effects of a nature-sound mobile application on psychological well-being and cognitive performance among university students. It remains unclear whether and to what extent exposure to nature sounds will affect psychological well-being and cognitive performance in daily life settings beyond laboratories. However, these studies focused on the effects of exposure to nature sounds in experimental environments. With respect to auditory elements of the natural environment, the previous studies have shown promising effects of nature sounds in terms of perceived restorativeness (e.g., Payne, 2013 Ratcliffe et al., 2016) and cognitive performance (e.g., Abbott, 2015 Van Hedger et al., 2019 Barton, 2020). How, then, might students manage mental fatigue? According to the literature, exposure to the natural environment, which contains both visual and auditory elements, has long been suggested by environmental psychologists as an approach to handling mental fatigue ( Ulrich, 1983 Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989 Ulrich et al., 1991 Kaplan, 1995). On the other hand, mental fatigue may affect the ability to maintain optimal cognitive performance, for example, the loss of attentional focus, lack of self-control, and poor decision-making performance ( Kaplan, 1987 Abbott, 2015). On the one hand, mental fatigue may lead to emotional dysregulation ( Grillon et al., 2015 Manning et al., 2019), which has negative impact on psychological well-being. In summary, mental fatigue could happen unconsciously along with university students’ daily lives. Engagement in the extensive use of ICTs or media multitasking is likely to exert a negative influence on students’ psychological well-being and cognitive performance (e.g., Young, 1998 Park et al., 2011 Shapiro and Margolin, 2014 Uncapher and Wagner, 2018 Luo et al., 2020a, 2020b). Third, the wide adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has significantly changed the daily life and entrainment experiences of human beings including university students ( Lips et al., 2017 Lu et al., 2019). Effective learning nowadays requires the processing of a large amount of information from multiple sources, which may place high-cognitive demand on learners ( Sweller, 1994 van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005). Second, university students are expected to engage in effective learning for developing advanced knowledge and skills to solve real-world complex problems. These experiences may make them feel mentally exhausted, so called mental fatigue ( Kaplan, 1987) – the psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity ( Marcora et al., 2009). They also experience external pressure in peer competition and job-seeking practices ( Stieger et al., 2020). First, university students are often busy with daily schedules such as attending lectures, working on projects, and participating in academic and social events ( Abbott, 2015). Meanwhile, it has brought challenges to students in multiple aspects. Modern society offers various opportunities for university students to learn, play, and live. The findings reveal the positive impact of exposure to relaxing nature sounds on university students’ psychological well-being and cognitive performance, as well as the potential of mobile applications to provide easy exposure to nature sounds. After a 4-week exposure to the intervention, the students in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group on psychological well-being reflected in positive affect, as well as cognitive performance reflected in flow state, attention (in terms of alerting) and working memory (in terms of accuracy and reaction time). The study was conducted with 71 students from a university, who were randomly assigned to the experimental group using a nature-sound mobile application in daily life and the control group not using the application. It remains unclear what are the effects of exposure to nature sounds in daily life settings. While the natural environment contains both visual and auditory elements, research on the effects of auditory elements, such as nature sounds, is underdeveloped and limited to laboratory settings. Exposure to the natural environment is found to have restorative effects on mental fatigue, which can be explained by its benefits in physiological, psychological, and cognitive aspects. Many university students have been struggling with multiple challenges that may cause mental fatigue.
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