Flowers reduce psychological and physiological stress in humans

几乎没有证据表明人类观赏花朵时的生理和神经反应。我们比较了观看花卉图片或其他图片的情况下，心理应激后血压、应激激素和脑激活的变化。我们的结果表明，一幅花卉图片有效地降低了因心理应激而升高的负面情绪、血压和皮质激素。我们还发现，花朵会使杏仁核周围的大脑区域失活。结果表明，杏仁核的失活导致下丘脑的激活减少，这可能导致副交感神经相对于交感神经的优势，从而减少急性生理反应。在野外工作中，我们为痴呆患者及其照顾者提供了切花，并调查了他们的心理健康变化。在生活空间摆放鲜花后，患者的疲劳感减少，护理者的心理幸福感提高。

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.