The COVID-19 pandemic has not only jeopardized people’s physical health, but also put additional strain on their mental health. This study explored the role of indoor natural elements (i.e., green plants) in relieving individuals’ mental stress during a prolonged stressful period. A pilot and three formal studies examined the effect of indoor green plants placed in living and working environments on people’s perceived stress during the pandemic and further uncovered its underlying mechanism emphasizing a mediating role of emotion. The pilot study confirmed that the severity of the pandemic positively correlated with individuals’ level of stress. Study 1 then demonstrated that indoor green plants in people’s living environments might reduce their perceived stress during the pandemic, which is referred to as the “plant effect”. Study 2 repeated the plant effect in a field experiment conducted in a working environment and Study 3 revealed a mediating role of positive emotion. This study provides preliminary evidence for the mitigating effect of indoor green plants on individuals’ mental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The indoor green plants placed in living and working environments may elicit positive emotion, which in turn reduce people’s mental stress. In addition, our results reveal that growth status of the indoor green plants affected the plant effect as well.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the world economy and has, most presumably, exerted a great deal of stress on citizens, in turn leading to the call for timely assessments of how this period might actually impact individuals at the level of everyday well-being and in their behaviors such as consumer decisions. Through one pilot study and two online survey studies, we tentatively investigated this latter question, and demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic may increase perceived stress and impair individuals’ sleep quality, which in turn impels their irrational consumption. This research provides preliminary evidence for the impact of the present pandemic on irrational consumption and contributes to the literature on stress and consumer behavior.

The impact of anthropomorphism on charitable giving behavior has been extensively studied, but not all forms of anthropomorphism have a positive effect on donation intentions. Additionally, the influence of anthropomorphism on cognitive processing during individual donation decisions remains incomplete. This study aims to investigate how different scenarios involving anthropomorphism affect donation intentions and measure changes in empathic responses using cognitive neural methods to uncover the neural representation associated with anthropomorphic money for monetary donations. By utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), participants’ frontal activations are measured while performing a monetary donation task within four groups designed as a between-participants experiment with factors including object type (money vs. product) and presence or absence of anthropomorphism (yes vs. no). The results reveal three main findings: first, money anthropomorphism specifically enhances individuals’ intention to donate; second, empathy significantly influences both information-processing and donation decision stages; third, complex cognitive processes including affective empathy (rIFG), rational processing, and reward processing during the information-processing stage predict subsequent donation intentions, whereas cognitive empathy (lIFG) during the decision stage determines the amount of money donated. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how anthropomorphism impacts monetary donation decision-making.