Let’s Talk About Nature: Understanding Multifaceted Nature Experiences in the United States Using Social Media

There is great diversity in the natural environments that humans interact with. It is important to understand how this physical diversity influences the psychological experience of nature activities. In this study, we used a keyword search to identify Twitter posts in the United States ( N tweets = 391,577) discussing a nature-based experience. Using topic modeling to determine how people share their experiences, we examined how the resulting topics varied by the surrounding physical environment, which was determined using either visual features of images ( N tweets = 61,661) or geo-location data ( N tweets = 15,571). A myriad of themes emerged from the topic model, including photography, hunting, hiking, and family fun. All topics had an average positive valence and many reflected affective and social processes. The prevalence of topics was associated with geospatial and image properties. Overall, the results emphasize that the physical environment predicts the multi-faceted impacts of nature engagement on cognitive processes.