Restoration theories: Path to insight or road to nowhere?

For more than four decades, research on restorative environments has been guided by two influential theoretical frameworks: Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and Stress Reduction Theory (SRT). While these theories have been instrumental in shaping the field, they have also faced criticism. Although it might appear that the limitations of both theories could be resolved through adjustments and further research, we adopt a meta-theoretical perspective to assess ART and SRT against general standards of theory construction. We argue that neither framework meets core standards for predictive utility or explanatory power. We focus on two issues. On the one hand, critical constructs assumed to predict restorative nature experiences are often vague, circular (e.g., “soft fascination”) or underdetermined in terms of their level of specificity. On the other hand, both theories exhibit explanatory fragility: ART’s resource-based account of restoration does not clarify how depletion and replenishment actually occur, whereas SRT’s evolutionary explanation posits what appears to be an unnecessary and unfalsifiable adaptive mechanism. We conclude by challenging the assumption that the psychologically beneficial effects of nature are in some way “special” and instead advocate for greater epistemic restraint in building nature-specific theories around beneficial nature effects.