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Forest bathing is an outdoor activity, and it might be a promising preventive treatment for social problems involving stress. A vast number of studies confirm the positive effects of this activity on people's health. Nevertheless, little is known about the influence of winter forest bathing when conducted in an environment with snow cover on the ground and trees. Thus, a crossover experiment was designed in this study, with the participation of twenty-two healthy university students from Finland. During the experiment, a short exposition by a forest environment or landscape with buildings (as a control) was applied. Participants self-reported their psychological relaxation before and after the exposition, and the results were analyzed and compared. The mood, emotions, restorativeness, and subjective vitality were recorded as indices reflecting the psychological relaxation effect. The negative mood indices decreased significantly after exposition by the snow-covered environment, but the positive 'vigor' indices did not increase or decrease significantly. The level of negative emotions increased after the exposition with the control environment. Likewise, positive emotions decreased after the interaction with the control. Restorativeness was significantly increased after the exposition by the experimental forest but decreased after the viewing of the control buildings. The size of the effect in terms of restorativeness was the highest in this experiment. The subjective vitality was lowered as affected by the control, but it did not increase or decrease after the exposition with the experimental forest. There is probably an effect from the slight interruption in the process from the influence of the forest greens on participants because their vigor and vitality did not increase after the exposition with this environment in the study. However, snow might influence the participants as a calming and emotion-lowering component of the environment, but this idea needs to be further explored with the involvement of participants from other countries who would be viewing forest environments with snow cover and whose psychological relaxation could be measured., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Beneficial effects of music on several performance-related aspects of sport have been reported, but the processes involved are not well understood. The purpose of the present study was to investigate effects of relaxing and arousing classical music on physiological indicators and subjective perceptions of arousal during imagery of a sport task. First, appropriate music excerpts were selected. Then, 12 skilled shooters performed shooting imagery while listening to the three preselected music excerpts in randomized order. Participants' galvanic skin response, peripheral temperature, and electromyography were monitored during music played concurrently with imagery. Subjective music ratings and physiological measures showed, as hypothesized, that unfamiliar relaxing music was the most relaxing and unfamiliar arousing music was the most arousing. Researchers should examine the impact of unfamiliar relaxing and arousing music played during imagery on subsequent performance in diverse sports. Practitioners can apply unfamiliar relaxing and arousing music with imagery to manipulate arousal level.

Objectives: The effects of hypnosis on physiological (gastrointestinal) functions are incompletely understood, and it is unknown whether they are hypnosis-specific and gut-specific, or simply unspecific effects of relaxation., Design: Sixty-two healthy female volunteers were randomly assigned to either a single session of hypnotic suggestion of ingesting an appetizing meal and an unappetizing meal, or to relax and concentrate on having an appetizing or unappetizing meal, while the electrogastrogram (EGG) was recorded. At the end of the session, participants drank water until they felt full, in order to detect EGG-signal changes after ingestion of a true gastric load. During both conditions participants reported their subjective well-being, hunger and disgust at several time points., Results: Imagining eating food induced subjective feelings of hunger and disgust as well as changes in the EGG similar to, but more pronounced than those seen with a real gastric water load during both hypnosis and relaxation conditions. These effects were more pronounced when imagining an appetizing meal than with an unappetizing meal. There was no significant difference between the hypnosis and relaxation conditions., Conclusion: Imagination with and without hypnosis exhibits similar changes in subjective and objective measures in response to imagining an appetizing and an unappetizing food, indicating high sensitivity but low specificity.

Inspired by a theory of embodied music cognition, we investigate whether music can entrain the speed of beat synchronized walking. If human walking is in synchrony with the beat and all musical stimuli have the same duration and the same tempo, then differences in walking speed can only be the result of music-induced differences in stride length, thus reflecting the vigor or physical strength of the movement. Participants walked in an open field in synchrony with the beat of 52 different musical stimuli all having a tempo of 130 beats per minute and a meter of 4 beats. The walking speed was measured as the walked distance during a time interval of 30 seconds. The results reveal that some music is 'activating' in the sense that it increases the speed, and some music is 'relaxing' in the sense that it decreases the speed, compared to the spontaneous walked speed in response to metronome stimuli. Participants are consistent in their observation of qualitative differences between the relaxing and activating musical stimuli. Using regression analysis, it was possible to set up a predictive model using only four sonic features that explain 60% of the variance. The sonic features capture variation in loudness and pitch patterns at periods of three, four and six beats, suggesting that expressive patterns in music are responsible for the effect. The mechanism may be attributed to an attentional shift, a subliminal audio-motor entrainment mechanism, or an arousal effect, but further study is needed to figure this out. Overall, the study supports the hypothesis that recurrent patterns of fluctuation affecting the binary meter strength of the music may entrain the vigor of the movement. The study opens up new perspectives for understanding the relationship between entrainment and expressiveness, with the possibility to develop applications that can be used in domains such as sports and physical rehabilitation.