Sound of birds singing can help improve mental health

By Alice Clifford via SWNS

The sound of birdsong can help improve mental health, a new study reveals.

Researchers believe that the sound of nature thriving around us makes us more relaxed.

The team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, examined how traffic noise and birdsong affects mood, paranoia and cognitive function.

They carried out a randomized online experiment with 295 participants.

Each person listened to six minutes of either traffic noise or bird song. They did cognitive tests and filled out a questionnaire which assessed their mental health before and after listening.

Emil Stobbe, predoctoral fellow at the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and lead author of the study, said: “Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people can also experience anxious thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions.

“The questionnaires enable us to identify people's tendencies without their having a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, and paranoia and to investigate the effect of the sounds of birds or traffic on these tendencies."

While the study showed that birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants, it did not have an influence on those suffering from depression.

In these people, the traffic noise generally worsened their depressive states, especially in those audio clips that had many different traffic sounds.

They also found that neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance.

The results offer new avenues for further research, such as seeing how changing background noise in different situations can affect mood, or examining how noise influences patients with diagnosed anxiety disorders or paranoia.

“Birdsong could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an audio CD would be a simple, easily accessible intervention," Stobbe said.

“But if we could already show such effects in an online experiment performed by participants on a computer, we can assume that these are even stronger outdoors in nature.”

Their research complements their past study that showed that a one-hour walk in nature can reduce stress.

Dr. Simone Kühn, the research group’s head said: “We cannot say yet which features of nature – smells, sounds, color, or a combination thereof – are responsible for the effect. The present study provides a further building block to clarify this issue.”

The results of this study are published in the journal, Scientific Reports.