Social; week 6; how the environment shapes behaviour

What is environmental psychology?

“The discipline that studies the interplay between individuals and the built and natural environment”  

(Steg et al., 2013, p. 2)

Environmental psychology PYS1001 Vs PSY2001

Psy2001: the influence of the environment of human experiences, behaviour and well-being

PSY1001: The influence of individuals on the environment- e.g., understanding and promoting sustainable behaviour

The emerging discipline of environmental psychology

Examples of how the (built) environment can shape behaviour

Boutellier et al. (2008)

• studied the effect of office layout…

  • cell offices Vs multi-space layout (x2)

• …on communication…

  • frequency of face-to-face communication

  • average duration of each event

    • assess via observation

• …in Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland

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Effect of the environment depends on the nature of the task

Seddigh et al (2014)

• independent variables

  • Office type

    • cell or individual offices

    • shared-room offices

    • small open-plan offices

    • medium-sized open-plan offices

    • large open-plan offices

    • flex offices

  • Type of task

    • to what extent do you have individual tasks that require concentration?

• dependent variables

  • distraction

    • how often are you for some reason disturbed so that you do not get the opportunity to fully immerse yourself in the task you have in front of you

  • cognitive stress

    • how much of the time during the past 4 weeks have you found it difficult to think clearly?

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Effect of the environment depends on the nature of the person

Field Theory (Lewin, 1940)

• behaviour is determined by the interaction between a person and their environment

• Lewin’s Equation: •: 𝐵 = 𝑓(𝑃, 𝐸)

  where 𝐵 is behaviour, 𝑃 is person, and 𝐸 is the environment, f(P, E) is the ‘life space’

• Using topology to map the ‘life space’

  • P is the individual

  • O represents their current situation or behaviour

  • G is the goal that they wish to achieve

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Environmental response inventory

McKechnie (1974)

• includes need for privacy

  • there are often times when I need complete silence

  • I am happiest when I am alone

  • I get annoyed when people drop by without warning

  • I am easily distracted by people moving about

• Gifford (1980)

  • Found negative correlations between need for privacy and evaluations of a cafe (r=-0.22) and city hall (r=-0.17)

Roskams et al. (2019)

• characteristics of the task

  • task complexity

  • interactivity

• characteristics of the person

  • the Big Five Mini-Markers Extraversion Sub-scale

  • Weinstein’s (1978) Noise sensitivity scale

• outcomes

  • acoustic comfort

  • disturbances by speech

  • difficulties in concentration

  • perceived stress

  • work engagement

  • office productivity

• “Participants with higher noise sensitivity tended to rate the acoustical quality of the office more negatively, were more disturbed by speech, had greater difficulties in concentration, were more stressed, and had lower self-rated productivity …. 

• Thus, it can be concluded that the appropriateness of open-plan office for effective work performance is largely moderated by an individual’s noise sensitivity.”

Summary of part 1

• Certain environments support certain tasks, so the effect of the environment on outcomes depends on the task

• environmental psychology

• Lewin’s Field Theory (behaviour is a function of the person and the environment)

what makes an environment ‘restorative’?

• Perceived Restorativeness Scale (Hartig et al., 1996; 1997)

  • Fascination

    • My attention is drawn to many interesting things.

  • Being Away

    • Spending time here gives me a good break from my day-to-day routine.

  • Coherence (Extent)

    • There is too much going on.

  • Compatibility

    • I can do things I like here.

what aspects of zoo attractions make them restorative?

• looked at the butterfly gardens Vs the baboons enclosure

• an environment doesn’t need to possess all of the features and all aspects to be restorative, just specific parts

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auditory vs visual information

Jiang et al (2021)

• They play videos with sounds in headphones of different environments

  • they could alter noise to make it less or more compatible with vision, so could play nature sounds when looking at an office environment

  • so is it the visual or auditory aspect more significant and what happens when they aren’t compatible with one another

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• found that when you play nature sounds with nature visuals increases mood, however, when paired with an urban environment decreased mood

• the acoustic environment seemed to have a bigger impact than the visual environment

  • we like quiet places

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Strengths and weaknesses of Jiang et al’s research:

• low environmental and external validity

• artificial setting, so needs to be replicated in a more real-life situation

What effect(s) do ‘restorative environments’ have? - Mayer (2009)

Mayer et al (2009)

• He randomly allocated pps to 1 of 2 buses

  • the first bus went to a nature reserve and the second to a busy urban city

• whilst on the bus they reflected on a loose end in their lives that needs tying

• Once in their environment they either go on a 10 minute walk (nature reserve) or a 5 minute sit (city), then asked about their feelings surrounding the loose end

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• being in the nature helped them reflect better even if they had no connection to the area

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Soga & Gaston

• does spending time in (natural) restorative environments lead people to engage in more pro-biodiversity and pro-environmental behaviour?

• Systematic review including 52 effect sizes from 12 case studies

• Direct experiences with nature were positively correlated (r+ = 0.20) with actions with the intention of reducing environmental harms and promoting the protection of the natural environment

SHU and SU on restorative natural environments

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• We depend on nature in every aspect of our lives - it underpins our economy, health and society - and yet progress to restore our wildlife and habitats has been too slow. Ruth’s extensive knowledge and expertise will be vital to help us  deliver on our commitments to put nature on the road to recovery.

  [Environment Secretary Steve Reed]

Stress Recovery Theory - experiment

• Features in natural environments (immediately) evoke positive affect, without conscious recognition

• This serves to lower arousal and reduce stress.

Kang & Shin (2020)

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Attention Restoration Theory

Kaplan & Kaplan (1989)

• Most environments ‘fight’ for our attention and so are depleting.

  • Termed ‘directed attentional fatigue’

• However, natural environments:

  • Provide fascination

  • A sense of connectedness

  • A sense of being away from daily hassles

  • Are compatible with inclinations

• As a result, natural environments restore attention

Mayer et al (2009, study 1)

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• However, changes in how connected participants felt to nature (not attentional capacity) mediated the effect of exposure to natural vs. urban environments on outcomes

Contact with nature helps people regulate emotions? - experiment

• Bratman et al (2024) - Survey of 600 adults in the US

  • Frequency of contact with nature

    • About how often do you usually visit or pass through outdoor natural areas for any reason?

• Use of distraction

  • To feel less upset during upsetting situations, I divert my attention away from what is happening

• Rumination

  • “I think ‘Why do I have problems other people don’t have?’”

• Use of reappraisal

  • “When something upsetting happens, to feel less upset, I think about the possible benefits of the situation”

• Emotional ill-being and well-being

  • Measures of positive and negative affect, life satisfaction, purpose in life, and perceived stress

perceptual fluency account- experiment

Joye et al. (2016)

• Natural environments are processed more fluently than urban settings, due to their fractal patterns, which mean that they contain more redundant information than urban scenes

Hagerhall et al (2015)

• these are regarding fractals:

• EEG to measure the brain’s responses to images, which created fractals

• the responses could be characterised by the complexity of the environment

• for the alpha responses we want high scores on the y axis as this illustrates that we are paying attention

• what truly influences our responses is how random these fractals are, rather than the dimensions, as demonstrated by the alpha graph

• random fractals are easier to process,

• this could support attention restoration theory because our attention has lead to higher alpha scores

Why are environments restorative?

• Stress Recovery Theory

• Attention Restoration Theory

• Perceptual Fluency Account

Reading- introduction

What would you recommend to a friend who is feeling stressed and worried? Go to sleep? See a funny movie? Or take a walk in the forest? Chances are high that you will pick the latter option. Indeed, going into nature is probably among the most widely practiced ways of obtaining relief from stress and fatigue in modern Western societies. How can this be explained? More than 150 years ago, the Ameri can landscape architect Frederik Law Olmsted already noted that ‘scenery worked by an unconscious process to produce relaxing and “unbending” of faculties made tense by the strain, noise and artificial surroundings of urban life’. This analysis seems strikingly modern and prefigures recent theoretical formulations concerning the so-called ‘restorative’ or stress-relieving effects of nature.

6.2 restorative environments research

‘Restoration’ is an umbrella term that refers to the experience of a psychological and/or physiological recovery process triggered by particular environments and environmental configurations.

Natural environments tend to be more restorative than urban or built environments and may contribute to well-being and the prevention of disease and illness.

Research into restorative environments has been guided by two theoretical explanations.

First, stress recovery theory:

• is concerned with restoration from the stress

  • when an individual is confronted with a situation perceived as demanding or threatening to well-being.

Second, attention restoration theory:

• focuses on the restoration from attentional fatigue

  • occurs after prolonged engagement in mentally fatiguing tasks.

The two theories are generally regarded as complementary perspectives that focus on different aspects of the restorative process.

The experimental paradigm in restorative environments research

In this paradigm, volunteers first receive a stress or fatigue induction treatment (e.g. watching a scary movie; performing mentally fatiguing tasks).

Next, they are randomly exposed to real or simulated natural Vs built environments.

Stress and/or mental fatigue are measured at 3 points in time:

at the start of the experiment (Time 1),

after the stress-induction (Time 2),

after exposure to the natural or built environment (Time 3).

Changes from Time 1 to Time 2 indicate the effectiveness of the stress induction, while changes from Time 2 to Time 3 indicate the restorative effect of the environment.

The three main categories of dependent measures used in restorative environments research are:

• affective measures (e.g. how happy/ sad/ stressed do you feel at this moment?)

• cognitive measures (e.g. attention and memory tasks)

• physiological measures (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, cortisol levels)

These experiments demonstrate that stressed and/or fatigued individuals exposed to scenes of natural content have more positive mood changes, perform better on attention tasks and display more pronounced changes physiological stress recovery than individuals exposed to scenes dominated by built content. These restorative effects have been found natural environments including forests, rural scenery, waves on the beach and golf courses.

Stress Recovery Theory

Based on Zajonc (1980), Roger Ulrich argued that people’s initial response towards an environment is generalised affect (i.e. like, dislike) without conscious processing of the environment.

Initial positive affective responses come about when specific environmental features are present in the environment, including:

• the presence of natural content

• more structural features such as complexity,

• gross structural features (e.g. symmetries),

• depth/spatiality cues,

• an even ground surface texture,

• deflected vista (e.g. a path bending away)

• absence of threats.

Quick positive affective responses initiate the restorative process as they are a breather from stress, with liking, reduced levels of arousal and negative feelings such as fear.

If the scene draws enough interest, more conscious cognitive processing may take place and lead to more deliberative restorative experience.

attention restoration theory

While SRT considers restoration as a quick, affect-driven process, ART emphasises the importance of slower, cognitive mechanisms in restoration.

ART was described in 1989 by the Kaplans in the book ‘The experience of nature’, providing research on people’s relationship with nature, which includes restorative experiences, perceptions and visual preferences.

Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) are known for the ‘preference matrix’, a framework predicting people’s landscape preferences. The preference matrix can get confused with ART, however, they are distinct models.

A core assumption of ART is that people have a limited capacity to direct their attention to something not interesting. The cognitive mechanism to inhibit competing stimuli (the central executive) becomes depleted with intensive use. Depletion of this can result in directed attentional fatigue (DAF).

ART predicts that environments can counter DAF when the human-environment relationship is has 4 qualities:

• fascination of an environment to automatically draw attention without cognitive effort,

• a sense of extent or connectedness,

• being away from daily obligations,

• a compatibility between the individual’s inclinations and the characteristics of the environment.

Because these 4 qualities is typical for human interactions with natural environments, these environments tend to be more effective in countering DAF than built settings.

perceived restorativeness

• a second line of research has focused on measuring the perceived restorative potential of environments

• most studies use the perceived restorative scale

• The PRS consists of statements of the 4 restorative characteristics described by AR. Respondents indicate on a likert-type scale the extent to which the statements fits their experience of an environment

• sample items like:

  • ‘my attention is drawn to many interesting things (fascination)’

  • ‘there is much going on here’ (extent/ coherence)

  • ‘spending time here gives me a break from my day-to-day routine’ (being away)

  • ‘I can do things I like here’ (compatibility)

• Natural environments tend to be perceived as more restorative than built environments.

• The scale has evaluated the restorativeness of landscape designs and zoo attractions

The evolutionary origins of restorative nature experiences

It has been proposed that certain natural features (e.g. vegetation) and particular natural landscapes (e.g. savannahs) could offer ancestral humans resource opportunities and safety (e.g. trees as shelters), and promoted human survival.

Consequently, humans developed a biologically prepared readiness to display positive affective responses to such elements.

This evolutionary account has been put into question:

The few studies on restoration are performed with undergraduate students in Western countries. Such a limited group can’t provide any justification for the evolutionary, universalist assumptions underlying restoration theories.

A more conceptual problem is that the human species has always inhabited vegetated environments during its evolutionary history. Because this implies that greenery has always been available to everybody, it is unclear why there would have been any pressure for evolving preferences for these elements, as restoration theories seem to imply.

Perceptual fluency account- recent theoretical and empirical developments

The perceptual fluency account (PFA) is based on perceptual fluency and integrates SRT and ART.

The central assumption is that natural environments are processed more fluently than urban settings, and this fluency difference leads to a difference in restorative potential.

Perceptually fluent processing of natural stimuli is because the visual brain is more tuned in to the way visual information is structured in natural scenes than in built environments. Specifically, owing to their so-called fractal or self-similar patterns, natural scenes contain more redundant information than urban scenes, making it more fluent to process.

Within the PFA, the greater stress-reducing capacity of nature, as predicted by SRT, may be explained by the greater safety or familiarity commonly associated with fluent stimulus organisations.

The greater attention-restoring potential of natural environments, as predicted by ART, may be explained by the fact that fluent stimuli are lower on cognitive resource demands, which leaves more place for replenishing attentional resources.

connectedness to nature: recent theoretical and empirical developments

Another theoretical approach starts from the observation that people gain purpose and meaning in life by feeling that they belong to the natural world.

Based on this, feeling emotionally connected to nature is an important mechanism underlying beneficial effects of nature.

Mayer, et al (2009) found that the positive effects of exposure to nature on positive affect and the ability to reflect on an unresolved life-problem could be explained by increases in connectedness to nature.

These findings provide the first evidence that an experiential sense of belonging to the natural world plays a role in restorative environment experiences, besides more unconscious, automatic processes.

Micro-restorative experiences and instorative effects: recent theoretical and empirical developments

A third approach has focused on micro-restorative experiences that result from brief sensory contact with nature, as through a window, on television or in a painting.

Accumulated over time, micro-restorative experiences may significantly improve people’s sense of well-being and provide a buffer against the negative impacts of stressful events. A survey suggests that micro-restorative experiences are especially helpful when stress levels are low.

Teachers who frequently suffered from vocational stress (having to teach in overcrowded classrooms) preferred to be in nature (such as taking a walk in the woods), whereas those with low levels of vocational stress found sufficient merit in brief encounters.

Exposure to nature may also have instorative effects in individuals who are not stressed or fatigued. Unstressed individuals show that exposure to nature improves people’s mood states, ability to reflect, and increase energy levels.

application and implications- restorative design measures

Restorative design measures are most suited for contexts where stress and attentional fatigue are intense and hamper developmental processes.

This is why restorative elements are an essential part of evidence-based design (EBD) of healthcare settings. However, as aspects of urban living constitute a significant source of stress, scholars have argued for integrating nature-based design measures on urban environments.

In particular, micro-restorative and instorative effects of nature show that even in unstressed urbanites, green interventions still improve the appeal of the environmental context.

One challenge for applying restorative design measures involves the optimal amount of exposure to nature. Evidence suggests that you do not need to deeply immerse in a natural environment to experience restoration, however, there are thoughts that ‘more is better’, especially in urban areas with little green space.

• However, for natural elements like water there an upper limit for effective restoration.

Research shows that exposure not only to actual nature, but also to visual simulations (e.g. videos, paintings) and to olfactory (smells) or auditory components can have restorative effects. Restorative responses might even extend to geometric properties of nature, such as the fractal repetition of patterns at scale levels of natural scenes. This extends the scope of restorative design measures from actual nature, to imitations of nature and nature’s fractal geometry

summary

Contact with nature can provide restoration from stress and mental fatigue.

Two theoretical perspectives for the restorative effects of nature: SRT and ART.

While in both commonly assumed that restorative responses are ancient relics of human evolution in natural environments, that view has become criticised.

Theoretical developments relying on concepts such as ‘fluency’, ‘connectedness to nature’ and ‘micro-restorative experiences’ have aimed to deepen our understanding of restorative experiences.

The empirical evidence for restorative effects of nature is increasingly applied in healthcare and in urban and landscape planning, but further research is needed to optimize these applications.

Directed attentional fatigue

A neurological symptom, also referred to as ‘mental fatigue’, which occurs when parts of the central executive brain system become fatigued.

Perceptual fluency

The subjective experience of the ease with which a certain stimulus is perceptually processed.

preferenda

Features of a setting or an object that are evaluated very rapidly on the basis of basic sensory information.

fractal

A rough or fragmented geometric shape where the parts are reduced-size copies of the whole. Most natural structures are fractal in form.

micro-restorative experiences

Brief sensory interactions with nature that promote a sense of well-being.

extent

A quality of restorative environments, as described by ART, which is a function of scope and coherence.

Scope refers to the scale of the environment, including the immediate surroundings and the areas that are out of sight or imagined.

Coherence refers to a degree of relatedness between perceived elements in the environment, and the contribution of these elements to a larger whole

Being away

A quality of restorative environments, as described by ART, indicating an environment is free from reminders of daily obligations that overtax the capacity of directed attention.

compatibility

A quality of restorative environments, as described by ART, indicating a good fit between the individual’s inclinations and the characteristics of the environment, so that no attentional resources need to be devoted to questioning how one should behave or act appropriately.

fascination

A quality of restorative environments, as described by ART, indicating the capacity of an environment to automatically draw one’s attention without cognitive effort, thereby relaxing the demand on the central executive and leaving room for the replenishment of directed attention.

Instorative effects

Improvements in psychological and/or physiological functioning that are triggered by particular environments and environmental configurations.