Cloud Noticing and Forest-Therapy Elements in a Coastal Resort: An Exploratory Randomised Field Study

Abstract

Wellness resorts often market natural scenery without knowing whether a structured way of attending to it changes guests’ immediate experience. We examined cloud noticing and forest-therapy elements as two low-infrastructure forms of nature-directed hospitality programming. This exploratory, randomised field study reports outcomes from three facilitator-led arms of a four-condition parent experiment whose service-evaluation findings were published separately. The parent experiment allocated 120 adult resort guests equally, by individual manual lottery, to cloud noticing, forest-therapy elements, an active-control session, or an ordinary stay. The present complete-case dataset comprised 84 participants with linked measurements immediately before and after an organised activity: cloud noticing (n = 29), forest-therapy elements (n = 28), and active control (n = 27). The ordinary-stay group was outside the analytical scope because no additional session, and therefore no matched session-level measurement interval, was available. Linear mixed-effects models estimated group-by-time contrasts for state anxiety, positive and negative affect, and subjective restoration; perceived stress, connectedness with nature, six activity-specific ratings, resting pulse, and blood pressure were secondary or descriptive variables. Both nature-focused sessions showed more favourable short-term psychological patterns than the active control, with the clearest contrasts for subjective restoration. Cloud noticing was associated descriptively with awe, mental spaciousness, and perspective distancing, whereas forest-therapy elements were associated with sensory immersion, bodily presence, grounding, and the greatest increase in nature connectedness. Pulse and blood pressure are reported only as physiological field descriptors. The earlier companion publication examined experience quality, satisfaction, novelty, added value, and recommendation intention; none of those endpoints are reanalysed here. Applicability is limited by the single-resort setting, lack of blinding, complete-case analysis, absence of preregistration, and lack of follow-up.