The effect of watching nature-themed videos on social media platforms in helping university students recover from study fatigue

Abstract

This study is an exploratory study. It focuses on the issue of rest content selection in the contemporary college student population when faced with micro rest needs. This study agrees with the restorative role of natural elements mentioned in attention recovery theory for voluntary attention depletion and emotional depletion produced by cognitive fatigue. However, it is also concerned that in the field of Attention Restoration Theroy, there is no clear definition of whether the hard glamour stimuli that interfere with recovery such as viewing a cell phone are hard stimulus glamours in themselves or because of the content they provide. While retaining the use of such hard-charismatic stimuli is already a daily resting habit of college students, this experiment wonders whether virtual nature scenario videos presented through entertaining social media can still provide better recovery than hard-charismatic stimulus videos. The results of this experiment support the hypothesis that nature scenes videos have better restorative power than positive thematic videos for executive attention, mood, and subjective fatigue perception. It is concluded that watching nature-themed videos is a better choice for college students who wish to recover from fatigue and promote subsequent study status through micro-breaks.