Flowers reduce psychological and physiological stress in humans

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There have been few evidences to show physiological and neural reactions of humans viewing flowers. We compared changes of blood pressure, stress hormone and brain activations between condition of viewing a floral picture or other pictures, after psychological stress. Our results showed that a floral picture reduced effectively negative emotion, blood pressure and corticoid stress hormone which were elevated by psychological stress. We also found that the floral flower deactivate brain regions around the amygdala. Tease results showed that the deactivations of amygdale produce the decrease of activations in the hypothalamus, which may induce an advantage of parasympathetic nervous relative to sympathetic nerve, and reduce acute physiological reactions. In fieldworks, we provided cut flowers for patients with dementia and their care givers, and investigated their changes of mental health. The feeling of enervation of patients decreased and the mental well-being of care givers improved after they arranged flowers in their living spaces.