Research  |  UW News blog

April 21, 2025

Q&A: UW researchers examine mental impact of Girl Scouts’ interactions with nature

Think of your last memorable moment in nature. Did you spot a bird you’ve never seen before? Dip your toes in a river? Maybe climb a tree?

New research from the University of Washington, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Education, examined whether children’s interactions with nature that are embodied, rather than just visual, are associated with being in the moment and feeling connected to something beyond the self.

Researchers coded responses from 127 Girl Scouts, ages 8-11, about a recent meaningful nature experience. A questionnaire then assessed the degree to which participants experienced presence in nature, the study’s term for being in the moment. Exploratory analyses found that participants who had embodied interactions reported a greater sense of presence in nature than those who reported only visual interactions. 

Carly Gray, co-author of the study and doctoral student of psychology at the UW, talked with UW News about the study.

Can you explain the difference between embodied and visual interactions with nature?

Carly Gray: We think of embodied nature interactions as engaging senses other than just vision. One’s whole body is often involved. Whether you’re moving or being still, you’re experiencing nature through more than just your eyes. A visual nature interaction is one that just uses the sense of vision — maybe watching a bird through a window or looking at the textures in a leaf.

To identify visual and embodied interactions in the study, we applied what we call an interaction pattern approach, which is a way of characterizing the how humans interact with nature. A relatively abstract interaction pattern could be something like “listening to animals.” That interaction pattern could encompass more specific interactions ranging from “hearing your neighbor’s dog bark” to “hearing birdsong in a forest.”

That leads us to the idea of presence. How do you use that term in the context of this study, and how does it tie in with the other ideas you were discussing? 

CG: We think of presence as a meaningful experience with optimal awareness and some sense of connection beyond the self — whether that’s the natural environment that one is in, some higher power, other people you’re with, or something else. It’s frankly difficult to put into words, which I think speaks to some of the power of what these experiences can feel like. In this study, we were looking specifically at presence in nature.

How did you then quantify this information?

CG: We developed questions based on existing measures and created some questions of our own. We used these questions to ask the Girl Scouts about their experience of presence in nature during the experiences they had just written about.

We asked the Girl Scouts to write about a meaningful nature experience and tell us where they were, what they were doing and why the experience was meaningful. We combed through these written narratives to identify interaction patterns and developed a coding manual to describe how to do this in a standardized way. After reading through half of these nature experiences, we looked at the interaction patterns and noticed that a lot of them were relying on vision. Primarily, we noticed a lot of verbs like seeing, watching, looking, staring. For example, a visual nature interaction would be “looking at a tall tree.”

We wanted to know what might be different between the Girl Scouts who reported solely visual experiences versus more embodied nature experiences. The Girl Scouts who engaged in nature using more action-oriented verbs — talking, listening, smelling, feeling — engaged in embodied nature interactions. For example, “building a snowman” and “hiking on a trail” came up in a few participants’ narratives. We considered these embodied nature interactions. Some of my other favorite examples were “talking to chickens,” “jumping in puddles,” and “throwing snowballs.”

Based on their interaction patterns, some Girl Scouts were categorized as having only had visual experiences. If a Girl Scout wrote about at least one interaction that used a non-visual verb, they were categorized as having had an embodied experience. We compared these two groups, embodied and only visual, based on their numeric scores on our measure of presence in nature and found that the Girl Scouts who reported embodied nature interactions also reported a stronger sense of presence in nature.

What are some potential practical implications of this research?

CG: I think this is a promising first step into understanding what it might mean to have a meaningful experience in nature, especially among young children. In this paper, we wrote specifically about applications to environmental education. For example, children can be encouraged to smell nature by finding nature items that smell good to them, like pinecones or flowers, and bringing those back to the classroom for an age-appropriate ecology lesson. A writing lesson could begin with students listening to nature with their eyes closed and then writing a creative short story about what they imagined they heard. We expect these embodied educational activities might foster a greater connection to nature and a sense of meaning through experiences of presence in nature.

We conducted this study with 8-to-11-year-old Girl Scouts, but I think it could have implications for educating young people of all ages. In my teaching, I’m a big fan of getting whole bodies involved in the learning process. So, I think this idea of embodied versus visual interactions with nature could be applied all the way from preschoolers to through college students.

Embodied nature interactions don’t need to be limited to educational settings, either. This idea of embodied versus visual nature interactions can be a helpful framework for parents and families to think about meaningful ways to spend time interacting with nature with their children. This Earth Day, consider how you can go beyond looking at spring flowers to engage with nature in more fully embodied ways.

Other co-authors were Peter Kahn, UW professor of psychology and of environmental and forest sciences; Joshua Lawler, UW professor of environmental and forest sciences; Pooja Tandon, associate professor of pediatrics in the UW School of Medicine; Gregory Bratman, UW associate professor of environmental and forest sciences; Sara Perrins, lead public health research scientist at ICF, who earned her doctorate in environmental and forest sciences at the UW; and Frances Boyens of the Girl Scouts of Western Washington.

The study was funded by the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

For more information, contact Carly Gray at cgray19@uw.edu.

Tag(s): Carly Gray • College of the Environment • Department of Pediatrics • Department of Psychology • Gregory Bratman • Joshua Lawler • Peter Kahn • Pooja Tandon • School of Environmental and Forest Sciences • School of Medicine

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