Viewing a flower image provides automatic recovery effects after psychological stress

Multiple previous studies have reported that viewing natural scenery supports recovery from psychological stress. Viewing flowers is thus predicted to provide a recovery effect similar to that of viewing natural scenery. It remains unclear, however, how effectively viewing flowers promotes recovery and how the practice affects the brain. Using psychological, physiological, and neuroscientific techniques, we investigated the process through which viewing flowers regulates emotion. We found that passive viewing of a typical flower image downregulated negative emotions and decreased both elevated blood pressure and cortisol levels, which are two signs of stress-induced elevation, in response to an acute visual stressor (negative images). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined brain-activation patterns relevant to emotion regulation with automatic distraction upon viewing the typical flower image. We demonstrated that activation of the right amygdala–hippocampus region was decreased during viewing of this image in comparison to viewing a flower-mosaic or a visual fixation point after an acute visual stressor. Our results suggest that viewing a flower may induce automatic distraction from a stressor and lead to a reduction in amygdala–hippocampus activation and negative emotion, thereby downregulating physiological responses.