The Emotional Impact of Flowers

Humans have grown flowers for at least 5,000 years although most offer us no food or other obviously useful products. Modern floriculture is a multibillion-dollar industry. What caused humans to pursue this relationship? A team of researchers at Rutgers University theorizes that flowers produce positive emotional reactions that reward people for the efforts of cultivating the plants.

The scientists devised three experiments to test the response of humans to flowers. The first two experiments looked at the immediate emotional responses to a gift of flowers compared to the responses generated by equivalent gifts or no gift. The third study analyzed the reactions of a group of senior retirees to one, two or no gifts of flowers over a two-week period. Emotional responses where evaluated by noting facial expression and by standard mood inventories. Gifts of flowers evoked significantly higher emotional responses than other gifts in the first two studies and in the third they resulted in higher scores on cognitive tests.

The cause of this emotional response to flowers is not known. It is possible that humans associate flowers with potential food sources or have simply developed a cultural response to them. The researchers theorize that humans may respond to the natural products found in the flowers and that people may have begun cultivating them for positive emotional stimulation.

Link: An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers from Evolutionary Psychology

Posted by Eric La Fountaine at 2:15 PM on June 3, 2005