Abstract—Gardening therapy has been found to boost happiness and relieve emotional stress. As new adults, college freshmen are often challenged by stress and negative emotions arising from changes in their academic workloads, relationships, emotions, and finances. This experimental study measured changes of Design College in 60 freshmen’s positive emotions across five stages of horticulture, i.e., seedling raising, seedling thinning, transplantation, maintenance and management, and harvest, each of which lasted for 50 minutes. The subjects’ scores on the Positive Emotion Scale were highest for seedling cultivation (4.36/5), and lowest for harvest (3.91/5). This difference between the two stages was significant, while differences between the other stages were not. Aquaponics is combining aquaculture and hydroponic cultivation, and is also known as aquaculture symbiosis; Potted cultivation is associated with traditional continuous cropping in fields. In addition, 60 freshmen were divided into two groups with Aquaponics system and potted cultivation. It was found that, as compared to the 30 participants using traditional potted-horticulture methods, the 30 students engaged in aquaponic planting—which is based on fish and vegetable symbiosis—reported more positive energy and relaxation effects. However, these differences were not significant. The experimental results showed that freshmen's emotions were greatly influenced by three factors: design course, participant's coordination degree and operation content of each phase therapy.
Index Terms—Horticulture therapy, positive affect schedule, aquaponics system, potted cultivation.
The authors are with Chaoyang University, Taiwan (e-mail: eq23293022@gmail.com).
Cite: Yu-Chen Chien and Yu-Jou Liao, "Comparing the Effects of Aquaponics and Traditional Potted Horticulture on the Emotions of College Students," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 772-777, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).