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Environmental Psychology - Lecture Notes & Literature Summary
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A summary of all seven lectures, six guest lectures and all mandatory papers for the Environmental Psychology course at Leiden University 2020/21.
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ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY – LECTURE NOTES &LITERATURE SUMMARY
LECTURE 1 - SETTING THE SCENE
- Parts of environmental psy:
o Person in environment: How are thoughts, feelings & behaviors influenced by the
environment? But also how does a person influence the environment
o Reciprocal relations between persons & environments: Nature & City
o Social origin & meanings of man-environment interactions
o Opportunities for ‘change for the better’: increased well-being, improved environmental
quality, by behavioral interventions
Climate change, temperature raise, air pollution
Paper 1: Wohlwill (1970). Introduction of the role of environmental psychology
- Why is environmental psychology important?
o It is a response to concerns about quality of the environment
o It is problem oriented, applied & multidisciplinary
o It has unique potential to ask new questions
- Three forms of man-environment relations
o Environment guides and constrains behavior
o Long term exposure to general conditions (e.g. under- or overstimulation, crowding,
o severity of climate) may exert generalized effects
E.g. the climate of the place you live in has an effect on your working day
rhythm
o Behavior is oriented toward environment (people have different attitudes, values,
beliefs, and affective responses relating to their environment, they adjust & adapt to
environments)
- The use of space in everyday behavior = proxemics
- Three facets of environment-behavior interrelationships
o Environment can elicit affect
Highly complex environment More interest & higher amount of voluntary
exploratory activity
Low/intermediate complexity affective or evaluative responses
o Environment determines approach and avoidance reactions
E.g. migration patterns (countryside city), temporary movement
(vacation/tourism)
o Adaptation to Environmental Qualities as a Function of Prolonged Exposure
An individual's response to his environment after spending a long time in it
Change of affective and attitudinal responses to neutralize the effects of the
environment
- Issues not elaborated
o Individual differences
o Attitude formation and attitude change regarding environmental problems
, o Problems that seem environmental but are primarily social, economic, educational (e.g.
slums)
- What to do in the future?
o Research
o Training workers who deal with environmental problems
o Graduate training for psychologists
o Include environmental psychology into the undergraduate psychology training
- What is needed to establish environmental psychology as a discipline?
o Attention and support to build a scientific basis
o Environmental psychology lies between basic and applied research
o It is interdisciplinary
Paper 2: Goldberg (1969). Specific urban phenomenon
- Premises
o Designers like to think about the relation between physical form and social behavior
o These insights are based on intuitions rather than on science
o These insights are often wrong, because intuition hardly works & the scientific approach
is shallow
- The study
o Analysis of an environmental problem (adolescents driving fast)
o Demonstrates relationships between sociocultural, behavioral, and physical
environment Adolescents have nothing else to do so they go driving together
- Observations
o ‘Cruising’ has strict codes, different for men & women
- Unfulfilled promise: Didn’t solve the problem after analyzing it!
Paper 3: Kaplan (1995). Restorative effects of nature
- Attention Restoration Theory
o Directed attention
Important for focus
Needs cognitive capacity to inhibit distraction
Is under voluntary control
Inhibition controls distraction
o Consequences of fatigue
Fatigue after long directed attention Poor concentration, irritability, errors,
unwilling to help others
Impaired selection (problem solving), inhibition of affect, fragility, perception,
thought, action & feeling
o Restoration
Is needed to restore from fatigue
Sleep is insufficient for restoration
- Some environments can help with restoration
o Fascination: Interesting environment
, o Being away: From daily life activities
o Extent: You can stay a long time in the environment
o Compatibility: Match between what you like to do and what the environment provides
Nature is more restorative than urban environments
- Study by Hartig & Staats
o Effects of nature vs. urban environments on refreshed vs. fatigued students
o Nature was overall preferred, but especially by the fatigued students
o Nature was also thought to be more effective in restoring attentional recovery, again
especially by the fatigued students
- Cause of stress
o Physiological and psychological stress reactions are interrelated
o Stress response = organism’s adaptive mobilization to deal with a potentially negative
situation
o Resource inadequacy: when one doesn’t have the resources necessary to deal with the
situation
Appraisal: Determining that the individual resources are insufficient
Intuition/pre-attentive processes
Task causes gradual depletion of resources
o
Paper 4: Gosling (2002). Environmental “design” to form a personality impression
- Can the personality of a person be deduced from the interior of their room?
- Interactionist theories: individuals select and create their social environments to match and
reinforce their dispositions, preferences, attitudes, and self-views
o They also select and craft physical environments that reflect and reinforce who they are
- Brunswick’s lens model: elements in the environment can serve as a lens through which
observers indirectly perceive underlying constructs
, o
o Cue utilization = link between the observable cue and an observer’s judgment
o Cue validity = link between the observable cue and the occupant’s actual level of the
underlying construct
o Good match between cue utilization & cue validity = Better observations (observer
accuracy)
o Types of cues
Identity claims
Self-directed: For yourself, others might not know about the meaning,
intended to reinforce the occupant’s self-views (e.g. holiday souvenir)
Other-directed: For others, claims about achievements (e.g. certificate)
Behavioral residue
Interior: Aspects that show what you do in the room (e.g. pile of papers)
Exterior: Aspects that show what you do outside of the room (e.g.
umbrella)
- Observers form impressions about occupants using a two-step inference process
o 1. Infer the behaviors that created the physical evidence
o 2. Infer the dispositions that underlie the behaviors
- Research questions
o Do observers agree on personality ratings? (interobserver agreement)
o Which cues are used?
o Are observer ratings accurate?
- Data collection (Study 1: Office; Study 2: Bedroom)
o Occupant’s personality: Peer ratings & Personality measure (FFM)
o Room characteristics: Coders rated environmental features
o Observer judgements: Personality ratings based on examination of occupants’
environment
- Results Study 1
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