scholarly journals The Relationship between Landscape Metrics and Facial Expressions in 18 Urban Forest Parks of Northern China

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1619
Author(s):  
Ping Liu ◽  
Mengnan Liu ◽  
Tingting Xia ◽  
Yutao Wang ◽  
Peng Guo
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Landscape Metrics ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Green Space ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Urban Green Spaces ◽  
Forest Parks

Urban forests are an important green infrastructure that positively impacts human well-being by improving emotions and reducing psychological stress. Questionnaires have been used frequently to study the influence of forest experiences on mental health; however, they have poor controllability and low accuracy for detecting immediate emotions. This study used the alternative approach of facial reading, detecting the facial expressions of urban forest visitors and their relationships with the landscape metrics. Using the microblogging site, Sina Weibo, we collected facial photos of 2031 people visiting 18 different forest parks across Northern China in 2020. We used satellite imagery analysis to assess the elevation and pattern sizes of green space and blue space areas. Age and location were taken as independent variables affecting facial expressions, which were categorized as happy or sad. With increases in green space and intact park areas, people showed a higher frequency of expressing happy scores. The results showed that the forest experience frequently elicited positive emotions, suggesting that creating and maintaining urban green spaces enhance people’s quality of life.

scholarly journals Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Honxu Wei ◽  
Xingyuan He ◽  
Zhibin Ren ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Facial Images

Urban forests can attract visitors by the function of well-being improvement, which can be evaluated by analyzing the big-data from the social networking services (SNS). In this study, 935 facial images of visitors to nine urban forest parks were screened and downloaded from check-in records in the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog at cities of Changchun, Harbin, and Shenyang in Northeast China. Images were recognized for facial expressions by FaceReaderTM to read out eight emotional expressions: neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. The number of images by women was larger than that by men. Compared to images from Changchun, those from Shenyang harbored higher neutral degree, which showed a positive relationship with the distance of forest park from downtown. In Changchun, the angry, surprised, and disgusted degrees decreased with the increase of distance of forest park from downtown, while the happy and disgusted degrees showed the same trend in Shenyang. In forest parks at city center and remote-rural areas, the neutral degree was positively correlated with the angry, surprised and contempt degrees but negatively correlated with the happy and disgusted degrees. In the sub-urban area the correlation of neutral with both surprised and disgusted degrees disappeared. Our study can be referred to by urban planning to evaluate the perceived well-being in urban forests through analyzing facial expressions of images from SNS.

scholarly journals Can Urban Forest Settings Evoke Positive Emotion? Evidence on Facial Expressions and Detection of Driving Factors

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 8687
Author(s):  
Ping Liu ◽  
Mengnan Liu ◽  
Tingting Xia ◽  
Yutao Wang ◽  
Hongxu Wei
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Senior Citizen ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Daily Minimum Temperature ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mental Well Being

There is increasing interest in experiences of urban forests because relevant studies have revealed that forest settings can promote mental well-being. The mental response to a forest experience can be evaluated by facial expressions, but relevant knowledge is limited at large geographical scales. In this study, a dataset of 2824 photos, detailing the evaluated age (toddler, youth, middle-age, and senior citizen) and gender of urban forest visitors, was collected from Sina Weibo (a social media application similar to Twitter in China) between 1–7 October 2018, in 12 randomly chosen cities in China. Happy and sad expressions were rated as scores by FireFACE software V1.0, and the positive response index (PRI) was calculated by subtracting sad scores from happy scores. Regional environmental factors were collected to detect driving forces using regression analyses. Happy scores were higher in forests than in urban settings, while sad scores for toddlers were lower in forests than in promenades and squares. Females showed more positive emotional expressions than males. Increases in happy scores were driven by the increase of daily minimum temperature; while PRI declined with increases in latitude. Overall, an urban forest experience can evoke positive emotions, which is likely due to comfortable feelings in warm temperatures.

scholarly journals Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Honxu Wei ◽  
Xingyuan He ◽  
Zhibin Ren ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Facial Images

Urban forests can attract visitors by the function of well-being improvement, which can be evaluated by analyzing the big-data from the social networking services (SNS). In this study, 935 facial images of visitors to nine urban forest parks were screened and downloaded from check-in records in the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog at cities of Changchun, Harbin, and Shenyang in Northeast China. Images were recognized for facial expressions by FaceReaderTM to read out eight emotional expressions: neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. The number of images by women was larger than that by men. Compared to images from Changchun, those from Shenyang harbored higher neutral degree, which showed a positive relationship with the distance of forest park from downtown. In Changchun, the angry, surprised, and disgusted degrees decreased with the increase of distance of forest park from downtown, while the happy and disgusted degrees showed the same trend in Shenyang. In forest parks at city center and remote-rural areas, the neutral degree was positively correlated with the angry, surprised and contempt degrees but negatively correlated with the happy and disgusted degrees. In the sub-urban area the correlation of neutral with both surprised and disgusted degrees disappeared. Our study can be referred to by urban planning to evaluate the perceived well-being in urban forests through analyzing facial expressions of images from SNS.

scholarly journals Facial expressions of Asian people exposed to constructed urban forests: Accuracy validation and variation assessment

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0253141
Author(s):  
Haoming Guan ◽  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Richard J. Hauer ◽  
Ping Liu
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Accuracy Measurement ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Variation Assessment ◽  
Asian People

An outcome of building sustainable urban forests is that people’s well-being is improved when they are exposed to trees. Facial expressions directly represents one’s inner emotions, and can be used to assess real-time perception. The emergence and change in the facial expressions of forest visitors are an implicit process. As such, the reserved character of Asians requires an instrument rating to accurately recognize expressions. In this study, a dataset was established with 2,886 randomly photographed faces from visitors at a constructed urban forest park and at a promenade during summertime in Shenyang City, Northeast China. Six experts were invited to choose 160 photos in total with 20 images representing one of eight typical expressions: angry, contempt, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, scared, and surprised. The FireFACE ver. 3.0 software was used to test hit-ratio validation as an accuracy measurement (ac.) to match machine-recognized photos with those identified by experts. According to the Kruskal-Wallis test on the difference from averaged scores in 20 recently published papers, contempt (ac. = 0.40%, P = 0.0038) and scared (ac. = 25.23%, P = 0.0018) expressions do not pass the validation test. Both happy and sad expression scores were higher in forests than in promenades, but there were no difference in net positive response (happy minus sad) between locations. Men had a higher happy score but lower disgusted score in forests than in promenades. Men also had a higher angry score in forests. We conclude that FireFACE can be used for analyzing facial expressions in Asian people within urban forests. Women are encouraged to visit urban forests rather than promenades to elicit more positive emotions.

scholarly journals Optimizing Urban Forest Landscape for Better Perceptions of Positive Emotions

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1691
Author(s):  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Zhi Yang ◽  
Zhuo Chen ◽  
Mengyuan Guo ◽  
Peng Guo
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Forest Landscape ◽  
Positive Contribution ◽  
Negative Contribution ◽  
Male Adolescents ◽  
Mental Well Being

Interacting with urban spaces that are green and blue is believed to promote mental well-being and positive emotions. Therefore, there is an incentive to strategically design urban forest landscapes in a given space to evoke more positive emotion. In this study, we conducted a pilot study in Northeast China with 24 parks from 11 cities across 3 provinces. The subjects of the study are the visitors and a total of 1145 photos and selfies were collected from open micro-twitters in Sino Weibo (~50 individuals per park). Facial expressions of happy and sad emotions were recognized and rated as percent scores by FireFACE v1.0. Demographically, male adolescents smiled more than male visitors in other age groups and female teens. Females expressed more positive emotions than males according to their positive response index (PRI; happy-sad). Multivariate linear regression indicated positive contribution of green space to happy scores (estimate of 0.0040) and a stronger negative contribution of blue area to sad scores (estimate of −0.1392). Therefore, an urban forest landscape can be optimized by mapping green- and blue-spaces to predict spatial distributions of positive emotions. Male teens are recommended more as frequent visitors than people in other age ranges.

scholarly journals Experiential Contacts with Green Infrastructure’s Diversity and Well-Being of Urban Community

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mazlina Mansor ◽  
Ismail Said ◽  
Ismail Mohamad
Keyword(s):  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Urban Green ◽  
Urban Green Spaces ◽  
Infrastructure Network

The study explores the significance of residents’ experience with an array of green infrastructure in Taiping, a small town in central Peninsular Malaysia. It argues that the existence of a composite of greenery and open spaces in a town that has diversity contributes to sense of well-being of residents. Green infrastructure network is a composite of various types of greenery and open spaces linked by streets, waterways and drainages encircling and connecting urban areas, at all spatial scales. In Taiping, the green infrastructure network consists of a town park, street planting, open spaces of public buildings, pocket spaces between shop-houses, school playfields, neighbourhood open space, home gardens, and river corridors. Questionnaires (n=335) and semi-structured interviews (n=33) explored the diversity of the green infrastructure in the town and the causal relationship to well-being—physical, cognitive and social. The data suggested that green infrastructure afford residents diversity of experience. Diverse experiences of green infrastructure network, physically and visually attract residents to participate in active activities, to socialize and to perform other transactional activities outside their homes. Therefore, the effects from the participation trigger many positive moods such as serenity, relaxation, comfort and satisfaction. Moreover, in physical and social terms, experiencing urban green spaces such as parks and gardens afford town residents active living, and community participation and harmony. There were modest relationships between the dimensions of diversity with the well-being dimensions, suggesting that residents felt diversity affect their sense of well-being. Hence, the results implicate that urban green spaces are essential amenity for towns and cities that afford an individual and a community physical, cognitive and social well-being. Keywords:     Green infrastructure, Small town, Diversity, Well-being © 2017 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, UniversitiTeknologi MARA, Malaysia.

scholarly journals Informal urban green space: Residents’ perception, use, and management preferences across four major Japanese shrinking cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Green Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Common Element ◽  
Shrinking Cities ◽  
Willingness To Participate ◽  
Urban Green ◽  
Urban Green Spaces ◽  
Management Preferences

Urban residents’ health depends on green infrastructure to cope with climate change. Shrinking cities could utilize vacant land to provide more green space, but declining tax revenues preclude new park development – a situation pronounced in Japan, where some cities are projected to shrink by over ten percent, but lack green space. Could informal urban green spaces (IGS; vacant lots, street verges, brownfields etc.) supplement parks in shrinking cities? This study analyzes residents’ perception, use, and management preferences (management goals, approaches to participatory management, willingness to participate) for IGS using a large, representative online survey (n=1,000) across four major shrinking Japanese cities: Sapporo, Nagano, Kyoto and Kitakyushu. Results show that residents saw IGS as a common element of the urban landscape and their daily lives, but their evaluation was mixed. Recreation and urban agriculture were preferred to redevelopment and non-management. For participative management, residents saw a need for the city administration to mediate usage and liability, and expected an improved appearance, but emphasized the need for financial and non-financial support. A small but significant minority (~10%) were willing to participate in management activities. On this basis, eight principles for participatory informal green space planning are proposed.

scholarly journals The Accuracy Validation of FireFACE Software in Analyzing Facial Expressions of Urban Forest Visitors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Ping Liu
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Shenyang City ◽  
Validation Test ◽  
Tree Population ◽  
The Difference

The construction of sustainable urban forests follows the principle that well-being in people is promoted when exposed to tree population. Facial expression is the direct representation of inner emotion that can be used to assess real-time perception in urban forests. The emergence and change of facial expressions for forest visitors are in an implicit process. The reserved character of oriental races strengthens the requirement for the accuracy to recognize expressions through instrument rating. In this study, a dataset was established with 2,886 randomly photographed faces from visitors in a constructed urban forest park and a promenade at summertime in Shenyang City at Northeast China. Six experts were invited to choose 160 photos in total with 20 images representing one of eight typical expressions as angry, contempt, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, scared, and surprised emotions. The FireFACE ver. 3.0 software was used to test hit-ratio validation as the accuracy (ac.) to match machine-recognized photos with those identified by experts. According to Kruskal-Wallis test on the difference from averaged scores in 20 recently published papers, contempt (ac.=0.40%, P=0.0038) and scared (ac.=25.23%, P=0.0018) expressions cannot pass the validation test. Therefore, the FireFACE can be used as an instrument to analyze facial expression from oriental people in urban forests but contempt and scared expressions cannot be identified.

scholarly journals Facial Expressions of Visitors in Forests along the Urbanization Gradient: What Can We Learn from Selfies on Social Networking Services?

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongxu Wei ◽  
Richard J. Hauer ◽  
Xin Chen ◽  
Xingyuan He
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Forest ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Social Networking Services ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Friedman's Test ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Forest Parks ◽  
Northern City

People’s satisfaction towards the experience in forests is one of most important feedbacks that forest park managers need to meet positive visitors’ experiences. Although the drawbacks of questionnaire methodology are obvious for data collection from self-reported scores at the landscape scale, few alternative methods have been proposed. In this study, nine urban forest parks along the urbanization gradients in three capital cities of Northeast China were targeted to investigate their visitors’ selfies from social networking services (SNS) by assessing facial expressions. A total of 935 photos with location records were obtained from the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog in a social hot-event of ‘Golden Week Holidays of National Day of China’ of 2017. Images were recognized by FireFace software to assess scores of neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt expressions. Data were ranked in descending order and analyzed by Friedman’s test, correlation analysis, and Poisson regression. Visitors in downtown-forests showed fewer negative expressions at the most northern city than at the southern most one. The negative expressions tended to be alleviated with the increasing distance of forest parks from downtown. However, when the distance reached over 10 km no geographical effect was found. Female visitors showed positive emotional expressions to urban forests while male visitors showed no response. In conclusion, using data from SNS, this study found an experience in forest park less than 10 km from the downtown of a northern city resulted in female visitors showing the most positive expressions.

A MSPA-Based Approach of Urban Green Space System Planning

2012 ◽  
Vol 518-523 ◽  
pp. 5972-5979
Author(s):  
Qing Chang ◽  
Yao Qiu ◽  
Xue Li ◽  
Jian Sheng Wu
Keyword(s):  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Green Space ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Urban Green Space ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Spatial Pattern Analysis ◽  
Space System ◽  
Urban Green ◽  
Urban Green Spaces ◽  
Land Use Decisions

Urban green spaces are considered as the life support system in a city, if systematically planned, developed, and maintained, they may provide various ecosystem services in a sustainable way. By integrating the morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) and the green infrastructure (GI) network based on GIS, this study provided an urban green space planning method to guide urban sustainable spatial development and land use decisions in the Longgang District of Shenzhen in China. The approach has a robust performance in identifying the vital hubs and linkages in the urban green space system. It is hoped that this plan model based on MSPA, the function connectivity of urban green spaces could be farther strengthened so that some key zones in landscape pattern could be protected in the future development.

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