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영어

This study aimed to examine the impacts of visiting urban forests on the enhancement of the subjective well-being of urban dwellers. We used the frequency of visits and staying time in urban forests as the independent variables in explaining the positive/negative emotions and the satisfaction with life in general. An online survey was conducted by a private survey institute with 600 participants in the City of Seoul and 400 participants in the City of Daejeon, respectively, and the participants were selected by quota sampling method. The results of ANOVA analysis indicated that there were no significant interactions between the frequency of visit and staying time in forests in both cities. We observed that participants visited forests within the recent two weeks expressed higher positive emotion and lower negative emotion than non-visitors, the regardless frequency of visits. Regular forest visitors (at least once a month) showed higher satisfaction with life than non-regular visitors. However, staying time in forests appeared did not affect the positive/ negative emotions and the satisfaction with life in general. It was interesting to observe almost identical analysis results in both cities, which confirmed the existing theory suggesting that the level of genetically determined subjective well-being could be enhanced by intentional activities such as visiting urban forests. From this perspective, providing and maintaining attractive forests in urban settings by public institutions could be meaningful for enhancing urban dwellers’ welfare. In addition, the importance of visitors’ characteristics and group constraints were discussed as a tool to increase visiting forests for further studies.