Worth watching.
By Olivia Harden, Travel Reporter June 17, 2025 - SFGATE
A group of researchers at UC San Francisco conducted a study to prove that small acts of joy can add up. One of their methods was showing a 4-minute video to immerse participants in the most popular national parks in California.
The seven-day program required participants to engage in several micro-acts, such as creating a gratitude list, listening to an audio-guided reflection and watching mesmerizing clips of Yosemite National Park. The YouTube video, titled “Yosemite HD,” was shot over a decade ago by Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill for their time-lapse video channel Project Yosemite.
Yosemite HD
“Honestly, I think it was a bit of a choice of convenience. The person who is responsible for that video is Dacher Keltner. He’s a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he wrote a book about the science of awe, which was the subject of the video,” UC Berkeley professor Emiliana Simon-Thomas, who is also a co-author on the paper, told SFGATE. “... I think Yosemite was just kind of a prototypical, beautiful place that we could take some footage at.”
Researchers have previously explored the power of awe. In 2017, Greater Good Magazine reported that viewing videos that evoke a sense of awe can help a person feel small in a positive way.
UCSF researchers suggest this 4-minute Yosemite video boosts happiness
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