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Abstract The quality of urban environment has a profound impact on the health of women - one of the core subjects of urban life. Based on neuroscientific methods, such as the Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and the E4 wristband and taking a road section in Guangzhou as an example, this paper explores the impact of urban environment on women's emotional health from both objective physiological indicators and subjective psychological reports. The study finds that both environment type and travel sequence have a different impact on women's emotions. The level of spatial openness, the sudden change of environment type, and the mixed traffic flow are the main factors contributing to fluctuations in female participants' emotional arousal. Combined with the neuroscience experiment results and an in-depth interview, it proposes women-friendly planning and design strategies, such as improving vision permeability and creating reasonable transitional space, in order to provide a reference for the construction of healthy cities focusing on key populations.
Keywords women's health; urban environment; healthy cities; neuroscience
Introduction and literature review
It has been pointed out in the Healthy China 2030 Blueprint that the construction of healthy cities is an important approach for promoting the Healthy China Initiative, with special emphasis on the health of key populations, such as women, children, older adults, people with disabilities, and low-income groups (Chen et al., 2021). As one of the core subjects of urban life, women differ from men in the scope of activities and response to environmental stimuli (Pico-Alfonso et al., 2007), the quality of urban environment is comparatively more important to women than men (Kurt and Douglas, 2013). Therefore, it is necessary to conduct research on the female group and explore the impacts of different types of urban environment on their emotional health, so as to propose design strategies from a women-friendly perspective and ultimately provide a reference for the construction of healthy cities.
An emotion is a complex psychological reaction. Positive emotions could improve one's mental health, while negative ones tend to cause psychological disorders. It is commonly believed that emotional health is a structure that integrates both positive and negative emotions, and more positive emotions mean less negative ones and a healthier psychological state (Wang, Yuan, and Tang, 2017). Emotions mainly consist of three...