How campus restorative environments foster pro-environmental behavior among university students: the chain mediating roles of awe and nature connectedness

Global sustainability challenges—ranging from accelerating climate change and unprecedented biodiversity loss to tightening resource scarcities—have increasingly placed pro-environmental behavior at the center of modern environmental psychology. Within this broader academic and societal quest, university campuses are recognized as critical testing grounds where young adults undergo formative value development and lifestyle habit formation. Cultivating ecological awareness among undergraduates is essential not only for achieving individual sustainable lifestyles but also for realizing macro-level ecological civilization goals.

Historically, researchers and policymakers have concentrated heavily on macro-level policy interventions, formal classroom ecological education, and traditional value-based persuasion to inspire environmental responsibility. However, less attention has been paid to the everyday natural and cultural composite environments that university students routinely encounter as part of their daily academic lives. A new empirical study conducted by researchers Zhuquan Yang and Yan Li sheds light on this overlooked dynamic, examining how everyday campus landscapes subtly shape ecological actions through specific emotional and cognitive psychological mechanisms.

The Study Setting and Chronology

The empirical investigation was carried out at Hezhou University, located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China. The institution serves as a unique setting for environmental perception research because its campus is officially designated as a national AAA-rated scenic area. Blending rich natural elements—such as expansive woodlands, tranquil lakes, verdant tea fields, and horticultural botanical zones—with cultural features like folk culture museums, the campus provides students with routine, high-frequency opportunities for immersive nature contact and ecological cognition.

To capture robust data reflecting this environment, the research team conducted a structured questionnaire survey between September and December 2025. Utilizing a rigorous combination of cluster and stratified sampling methods—with strata defined across the first through fourth academic years—the researchers administered surveys to intact classes representing 55 distinct majors across humanities, social sciences, science, engineering, arts, and physical education.

Following strict data cleaning protocols to remove unrealistically rapid completions, uniform-response patterns, and incomplete entries, the final dataset comprised 768 valid responses out of 900 distributed questionnaires, yielding a strong effective response rate of 85.3 percent. The participant pool included 308 male students (40.1 percent) and 460 female students (59.9 percent), with ages ranging predominantly from 18 to 23 years old.

Theoretical Framework: Bridging Attention Restoration and Self-Transcendent Emotion

To conceptualize how routine environmental exposure translates into actionable ecological stewardship, the researchers integrated two well-established psychological frameworks: Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and self-transcendent emotion theory.

Attention Restoration Theory, originally pioneered by Stephen Kaplan, explains the front end of the psychological sequence. It posits that natural environments characterized by being away, fascination, coherence, and compatibility help individuals recover from directed-attention fatigue, inducing open, receptive cognitive states. Yet, ART alone does not fully explain how restorative perceptions transform into value-laden protective behaviors. To bridge this gap, the researchers incorporated self-transcendent emotion theory, which explains the back end of the process. This framework addresses how receptive cognitive states give rise to self-transcendent emotions—predominantly awe—which diminish self-focus, expand self-boundaries, and foster deep psychological identification with entities beyond the self, including the natural world.

Together, these frameworks construct a cohesive chain model: a restorative environment supplies the perceptual precondition necessary for experiencing awe, while awe provides the vital affective mechanism that deepens nature connectedness and subsequently motivates proactive environmental behaviors.

Key Empirical Findings and Structural Equation Modeling

The collected data were rigorously analyzed using SPSS 26.0 for descriptive statistics and common method bias diagnostics, alongside AMOS 24.0 for confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). Bootstrap resampling with 5,000 replications was subsequently employed to test the direct, indirect, and chain-mediating pathways, with demographic controls such as gender, academic year, and weekly frequency of nature contact factored into the equations.

The measurement model demonstrated acceptable overall fit indices ($chi^2$/df = 4.815, CFI = 0.919, TLI = 0.912, RMSEA = 0.071, SRMR = 0.035). The primary analytical results confirmed several critical hypotheses while revealing nuanced theoretical insights:

1. Direct Association: Campus landscape scene experience was strongly and positively associated with university students’ pro-environmental behavior ($beta$ = 0.487, $p$ < 0.001), validating Hypothesis 1 and aligning with prior literature on restorative spaces.
2. The Mediating Role of Awe: Campus landscape experience was robustly linked to awe ($beta$ = 0.813, $p$ < 0.001), and awe showed a significant positive association with pro-environmental behavior ($beta$ = 0.440, $p$ < 0.001). Bootstrap analysis confirmed that awe significantly mediated the pathway between landscape experience and environmental behavior (indirect effect = 0.361, 95% CI [0.290, 0.432]).
3. The Chain Mediation Pathway: While the direct association between campus landscape experience and nature connectedness alone was not statistically significant ($beta$ = 0.063, $p$ = 0.140), and nature connectedness did not independently mediate the association, the sequential chain mediation through awe followed by nature connectedness was highly significant (indirect effect = 0.040, 95% CI [0.017, 0.068]). Furthermore, awe was powerfully associated with nature connectedness ($beta$ = 0.670, $p$ < 0.001), and nature connectedness maintained a positive link to pro-environmental behavior ($beta$ = 0.074, $p$ < 0.001).

Implications for Campus Landscape Design and Higher Education

The empirical conclusions carry meaningful implications for university administrators, landscape architects, and ecological educators aiming to foster sustainable habits among young adults. Rather than relying solely on traditional didactic instruction or abstract policy messaging, higher education institutions can strategically optimize their physical surroundings.

First, campus architectural and landscape planning should embrace a dual design philosophy that prioritizes both restorative psychological recovery and awe-eliciting features. Planners can intentionally incorporate expansive water features, mature tree canopies, biodiversity-rich ecological zones, and dynamic seasonal flora. Such spaces effectively induce the perceptual fascination and cognitive "being away" required to prompt self-transcendent emotional responses.

Second, the findings suggest that emotional activation serves as a necessary psychological gateway. Because routine exposure to nature did not independently increase nature connectedness without the emotional jolt of awe, academic institutions should integrate experiential outdoor activities into campus life. Guided landscape exploration modules, outdoor reflection sessions, and immersive nature observation programs can successfully bridge daily environmental contact with internal psychological bonding.

Methodological Limitations and Future Directions

Despite providing robust insights, the study’s authors acknowledged several important methodological limitations. Because the research relied on a cross-sectional self-report survey design, definitive causal inferences cannot be established. Furthermore, tests for discriminant validity indicated substantial empirical overlap between pro-environmental behavior and its antecedents (campus landscape experience and awe), suggesting that these statistical associations should be interpreted cautiously as upper-bound estimates reflecting potential shared-method variance.

Additionally, the reliance on a single-institution sample—specifically a nationally designated scenic campus—means that findings may not automatically generalize to urban, highly built, or non-scenic university environments. The authors call for future investigations to utilize longitudinal designs, experience-sampling methods, behavioral observation metrics, and multi-site comparative frameworks spanning diverse institutional and cultural contexts.

Ultimately, this research provides an empirically grounded foundation for understanding how the everyday architectural and natural aesthetics of a university campus can quietly nurture the next generation of ecological stewards, proving that the spaces where students live and study play an active role in shaping a sustainable global future.