Abstract
<jats:p>How guests are guided to notice a destination may be as important as the natural features themselves. This article reports a distinct set of outcomes from three facilitator-led arms of a four-condition randomised field experiment whose service-evaluation findings have been published separately. The parent experiment allocated 120 adult resort guests equally, by individual manual lottery, to sky-focused cloud observation, 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 observation (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. Outcomes in this paper were state anxiety, positive and negative affect, subjective restoration, perceived stress, connectedness with nature, six activity-specific experiential ratings, resting pulse, and blood pressure. Relative to active control, both nature-focused sessions showed more favourable short-term patterns on the central psychological measures. The sky-focused arm was especially associated with awe, widened mental perspective, and distance from immediate concerns; the forest-focused arm showed stronger sensory absorption, bodily awareness, grounding, and the greatest increase in nature connectedness. Cardiovascular changes were small and interpreted only as supportive field observations. The earlier companion publication examined a different module—experience quality, satisfaction, novelty, added value, and recommendation intention—and none of those endpoints is reanalysed here. The present results therefore concern immediate restorative response rather than perceived service performance. Their applicability is limited by the single-resort setting, lack of blinding, complete-case analysis, and absence of follow-up.</jats:p>