Current Trends in Environmental
Psychology by Gary W. Evans (gwcl@cornell.edu ) | Vedi anche qui |
Environmental Psychology as a Field within Psychology Environmental psychology as a specialized discipline within psychology has lost much of its visibility as a unique area within psychology over the past decade. Some of this loss is bad; whereas much of it is surprisingly good--let me explain. The bad part is that much of the initial impetus for environmental
psychology came from the mutual desire of social scientists and designers,
particularly architects, to work together to create buildings that
would work better for people. Unfortunately that initial enthusiasm
has since waned, at least within the United States. The good part is that much of what environmental psychology brought
to psychology has been fully adopted into mainstream psychology. There
are many reflections of this. Submission rates for manuscripts to
the three major journals in the field, Environment and Behavior, the
Journal of Environmental Psychology, and the Journal of Architectural
and Planning Research are all very high. Environmental psychology
course offerings are at an all time high in North America with new
editions of the two best selling textbooks (Bell Fisher Baum and Greene;
Gifford) either just out or impending; two new texts have been published
in the past year in the U.S. (Mc Andrew; Veitch & Arkelin), and
Bonnes and Secchiaroli's text has been published in Italy; and several
additional texts are nearing completion. The Cambridge series on environment and behavior and Gower's Ethnoscape
series are both selling very well and each series has several volumes
in the pipeline. Furthermore, individual volumes continue to proliferate
both in North America as well as in Europe. The Handbook of Environmental
Psychology sold out its press run and has now been reissued by Krieger
Publications. Both Environment and Behavior and Journal of Environmental
Psychology have had strong sales of individual volumes or collected
articles compiled into books. North and South American (EDRA), European (IAPS), Japanese (MERA)
and Australian/New Zealand (PAPER) organizations are devoted to the
study of human behavior and the physical environment. Each manages
a regular conference, publishes proceedings, either annually or bi-annually,
and sponsors a newsletter. Both Sweden and Spain have national task
forces that regularly meet. Estonia has recently sponsored an international
conference and publication. There has also been widespread incorporation of environmental psychology
into other areas of psychology. The handbooks of both social and health
psychology have chapters devoted to environmental topics; health psychology,
the largest growing sector of psychology in North America, routinely
incorporates measures of social and physical environmental characteristics.
The new edition of the handbook of psychophysiology will contain a
major chapter on the physical environment and physiology. Cognitive sciences have incorporated cognitive mapping as a major
research area into their field as witnessed by the proliferation of
articles within cognitive journals on spatial memory, wayfinding,
and computational models of environmental cognition. Indeed, amongst
the earliest intellectual origins of environmental psychology was
concern amongst perceptual psychologists about the ecological validity
of traditional approaches to the study of perception. Child psychology as well as life span development research continue
to examine the role of both the immediate and background setting as
they contribute to healthy development. Developmentalists also maintain
a strong ecological perspective in their examination of the role of
different childcare settings as well as aging in place options as
they impact young and old individuals, respectively. Environmental
education is a major subarea within educational curricula and practice. In addition many leading applied and social psychology texts continue
to have chapters devoted to environmental psychology. Several introductory
books also include sections on applications of psychology with prominent
coverage to environmental issues. Finally, the Journal of Social Issues,
a major international journal devoted to psychology and public policy,
has had recent special issues on environmental stress, residential
mobility, environmental attitudes, human dimensions of global change,
environmental hazards, and in 1966, published one of the seminal volumes
outlining the field of environmental psychology. Psychology and the Environmental Design Professions Although the initial zeal of collaboration between architects and
psychologists has waned considerably, growing trends in other design
fields suggest increasing interest in behavioral science research.
Interior designers,for example, have altered their major scholarly
journal, the Journal of Interior Design, to reflect greater involvement
in social science research. Interior design departments are increasingly
recruiting new faculty with research training. Planners are looking
to social scientists for evaluation of various new development alternatives
such as new urbanism or transit oriented development. Landscape architects
are increasingly collaborating with researchers interested in the
concept of restorative environments, and landscape aesthetic assessment
is a mainstream topic within this field. Policy makers, interested
in cost-benefit analyses, are also looking to research to document
the value of open space, parks, transportation policies, zoning practices,
and the like. Although architecture as a practice has not embraced the behavioral
sciences to the extent hoped for, the education of architects typically
includes some exposure to human behavior. The idea that design affects
users and can make a difference in their lives is central to every
major design profession. In many other countries outside of North America, however, there
is better and more sustained collaboration between architecture and
environmental psychology. This seems particularly true in economically
developing countries and in smaller countries where the trivialities
of professional turf wars are not as easily tolerated. The direct link between environmental psychology and design has begun
to develop in the form of design guidelines or programming documents,
particularly for the design of specialized facilities. Major examples
include low cost housing, housing for alternative living arrangements
(e.g., co-housing), various medical facilities, facilities for people
with special needs (e.g. Alzheimer's disease, the physically disabled,
victims of abuse, recovering drug abusers) and environments such a
daycare and schools focused on healthy development among children.
Research continues to mushroom on the role of different living arrangements
for older people, ranging from micro features such as doorway design
to macro issues like availability of the correct matrix of services. One alternative to convincing designers of the value of social science
research for the design of better settings is to educate clients to
demand more of those who design for them. This approach has been the
hallmark of the Facilities Planning and Management profession. Researchers
at several universities have established collaborative relationships
with major international firms who recognize the critical importance
of physical facilities in today's marketplace. Changes in the nature
of work as well as in the workforce itself demand facilities that
are flexible, supportive of different and varied ways of working,
cost-effective, and pleasing to a well educated mobile workforce. Prominent Research Topics An important emerging area is the connection between global environmental
issues and psychology. This area builds upon early and still ongoing
important work examining operant paradigms as well as basic motivational
theories to alter ecologically destructive behaviors. Another exciting
direction for this line of work is integration of concepts from social
and cognitive psychology on judgment and decision heuristics. The
national Science Foundation of the United States, for example, has
put out a call for proposals specifically addressing human dimensions
of global change. Several environmental psychologists were involved
in the planning group for this new initiative. Paul Stern and his
colleagues at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have published
a recent monograph in this area, an Annual Review of Psychology piece,
and the Journal of Environmental Psychology has recently edited a
special issue on the topic. Another prominent area within the field of environmental psychology
is the critical role of culture in understanding human-behavior relationships.
The growth of interest in environmental psychology in Central and
South America is heartening in this regard. For example, one of the
largest environmental psychology programs in the world is located
at the National University of Mexico. Issues related to housing, environmental
attitudes, mental health and the environment, privacy and place are
among major topics of interest in this program. Several collaborative
projects cutting across cultures are ongoing on crowding and noise,
restorative environments, alternative work environments, transportation
impacts, women and housing, and childcare facilities. Japan and the
U.S. have conducted a series of joint meetings on environment and
behavior; Sweden and the U.S. hosted an international meeting on environment
cognition, and action; and several trans-European studies, principally
surveys of public attitudes about environmental issues, have been
conducted. Another important topic of research and discussion within the field
continues to be criminal behavior and design. Since the initial interest
in defensible space, researchers and designers have continued to be
fascinated by the role of the physical environment in affecting crime
directly as well as its influence on fear of crime. The interplay
of these two processes is well illustrated by the incivilities theory,
use of landscape aesthetic principles, and research on the criminal's
perspective on crime. The new field of Investigative Psychology is
playing a dominant role in crime management in the criminal justice
systems of many countries. This field draws heavily from topics such
as place theory, territoriality, and environmental cognition, research
on prisons continues to underscore the positive and negative role
the physical environment plays in such settings. Interest in life in space has spawned a host of efforts within the
United States and Europe to develop programs for housing travelers
and workers in outerspace. This endeavor plus several other areas,
particularly related to health and safety issues in the workplace,
has renewed interest in more direct connections between environmental
psychology with human factors or ergonomics. The boundaries between
these disciplines is slowly eroding with environmental psychologists
studying more micro aspects of the human-technology interface, at
the same time that human factor specialists are studying such topics
as indoor air quality or stress in the workplace. The emergence of desk top simulation capabilities as well as more
exotic venues such as virtual reality, continue to fascinate researchers
and practitioners alike desirous of studying human reactions to various
spaces or objects prior to their actual development. Utilization of
simulation as a basic research tool has lagged behind its more practical
applications with some interesting exceptions in the areas of environmental
cognition and restorative environments. Finally, research on environmental stressors continues to receive
attention. Noise, crowding, pollutants as well as natural and technological
disasters have psychophysiologic, health, and cognitive implications.
The actual behaviors of people during emergencies has also provided
critical insights into human behavior that inform emergency planning
policies as well as the design of spaces to minimize harm when disasters
do occur. Overcharging Conceptual and Methodological Issues A conceptual topic of continuing interest within environmental psychology
is the concept of place. How are places developed, how do they acquire
meaning to people, how are they related to people's plans of action,
their preferences, and even to their emotional reactions and well
being? And what does the concept mean across generations or across
cultures? Place making and the development and sustainability of community
has been the subject of several recent books in the field. There continues to be a strong commitment within environmental psychology
to try and study human-environment relationships within the full contextual
framework in which they occur. Accepting the mantle from Barker and
his early associates, researchers in environmental psychology continue
to struggle with how to do this in a manner that yields reasonable
guidance about important causal variables. Related to this concern
with ecological validity coupled with rigor is the appropriate unit
of analysis for study--is it persons, settings, person by setting
interactions or some new entity of person-environment unit? Studies
of multiple stressors, cross over effects between different settings
(e.g., home-work), life course trajectories, multiple level analyses
(e.g., family and neighborhood effects on child development) are examples
of this more contextualized perspective. Greater methodological and analytic sophistication is now also apparent
in environmental psychology. For example in the study of environmental
stressors a prospective, longitudinal study of chronic residential
crowding has been conducted in the U.S. and an ongoing prospective
study is underway on airport noise and children in Germany. Analytic
investigations of unit of analysis, cross-level effects, as well as
environmental sampling have been undertaken. Increasing awareness
of the important conceptual and analytic distinctions between mediator
processes and moderator processes in the links between human behavior
and the physical environment are apparent. Moreover the field's long-standing
commitment to multiple methods of measurement continues unabated. There is a growing interest among some environmental psychologists
to connect up their work with poverty as it becomes increasingly clear
that poor environmental quality is often a major constituent of the
plethora of suboptimal conditions in which the poor live. This trend
appears particularly strong in Third World countries and has influenced
current research on topics such as urban stressors, street children,
and residential housing. A related issue that some are considering
is the potential role of psychical factors to help account for the
well established health-income relationship as well as the linkages
between poverty and developmental psychopathology. In conclusion, please let me apologize for my North American bias
in presenting this overview for IAAP members. I welcome any corrections
or additions from my colleagues throughout the world. Author Notes Gary W. Evans, President of the Environmental Psychology Division
of the IAAP, is Professor of Human-Environment Relations, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4401, USA. I thank Robert Bechtel, David
Canter and Nancy Wells for critical feedback on a draft of this note.
See Stokols, D. (1995), American Psychologist, 50, 821-837,
for a more in-depth, scholarly analysis of the international field
of environmental psychology.
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