Journal of Environmental Psychology最新文献

Although the role of the home environment in the development of prosocial behaviour in childhood is well-established, the existing research has focused on the emotional microclimate of the home. We do not know whether the physical home environment has a role to play too. The present study aims to fill this gap. It uses data from a large, nationally representative birth cohort survey in the UK, tracking the trajectories of prosocial behaviour in children across ages 3, 5, 7 and 11 years as a function of three constructs derived from the Home Observation Measurement of the Environment Short Form (HOME-SF), assessed at age 3 years: physical organisation of the home, mother's emotional and verbal responsivity, and mother's use of harsh discipline. Prosocial behaviour was assessed via a parent-reported subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The findings, which were robust to adjustment for sex, ethnicity, cognitive ability, special educational needs, neighbourhood environment, family income, family structure, maternal mental health, maternal education and religiosity, showed that all three aspects of the home environment were associated with prosocial behaviour. However, when controlling for all three simultaneously, physical organisation ceased to be a significant predictor of prosocial behaviour although the two measures of the home's emotional environment retained their significance. This indicates that, compared to the physical, the emotional climate of the home has a more substantial impact on children's prosocial behaviour. It also suggests that the physical and the emotional context of the home are strongly interrelated, with aspects of emotional harshness possibly mediating the effects of the home's physical disorganisation.

While people across the world are experiencing hotter summers, there is still a considerable number of people who believe that climate change is a hoax. It thus raises the question of whether the experience of local temperature anomalies would influence people's beliefs about climate change conspiracy. To address this question, we conducted a two-wave longitudinal study with participants from the U.S. (Study 1) and mainland China (Study 2), respectively. We expect that the experience of temperature anomalies would serve as a cognitive proxy that counteracts the hoax conspiracy narratives and thus would be negatively related to belief in such narratives. We further explored whether this negative association would be related to less perceived psychological distance, stronger negative emotions, and more climate change-related information exposure; and whether it would be weaker among people who tended to interpret things in a conspiracist manner (i.e., conspiracy mentality). In Study 1, our results support the hypothesized links cross-sectionally and longitudinally on the subjective experience of hotter summer, except for climate change-related information exposure. In Study 2, we found only cross-sectional associations between the constructs, except for climate change-related information exposure. Lastly, we found mixed evidence regarding the moderating role of conspiracy mentality between the studies. Our findings provide initial support that climate change conspiracy beliefs are malleable to people's subjective experience of temperature anomalies. The happening of temperature anomalies could be a crucial opportunity for promoting scientific understanding of climate change.

In-situ redevelopment policies, involving the construction of new apartment-style housing at original slum sites, have become a widespread approach to housing improvement in India. While much scholarly attention has focused on potential economic, administrative, and health impacts of such policies, the exploration of socio-cultural consequences has only recently gained prominence. Employing grounded theory methods and qualitative interview data from women residents in three housing settlements – one awaiting redevelopment, another redeveloped 2.5 years ago, and the third redeveloped 8.5 years ago – this study scrutinizes the socio-cultural impacts on women transitioning from slums to apartment-style housing. Socio-cultural impacts unfold in three overarching themes: spatial affordances of slum settlements for social life, experienced erasures in redeveloped settlements, and the social gains resulting from redevelopment. Findings from this study highlight the significance of interstitial semi-private spaces in slum settlements, acting as critical zones for social connection and cultural expression for women. Conversely, redeveloped settlements exhibit spatial erasures and a shift toward increased isolation. The elimination of interstitial spaces, coupled with an inability to modify the fixed housing structures in redeveloped houisng, contributes to social atomization and a fragmented sense of community post-redevelopment. This study underscores the intricate interplay between spatial configurations and the socio-cultural fabric of communities undergoing redevelopment.

Public housing provides low-income households with affordable housing. The few studies of young public housing residents have focused on the negative aspects of these residential environments, such as the presence of economic hardship or substance abuse. Few studies have looked at the possible positive influence of public housing on the lives of the young people who live there. This qualitative study explores the influence of housing and neighborhood on the well-being and personal projects of young people living in public housing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 young people aged 14 to 20 living in public housing in a large city in Quebec, Canada. A thematic analysis led to the identification of five themes that describe the components of the residential environment that influence young people's well-being and personal projects: 1) parks, playgrounds and nature, 2) services and activities, 3) privacy, 4) relations with the neighborhood; and 5) the quality of the built environment. Implications for environmental psychologists and for improving public policies and supporting the well-being of young people living in public housing are discussed.

The home represents the most psychologically, emotionally, and behaviorally important place in most people's lives. Although previous research has found that people are most strongly attached to their home, relative to other geographic scales (e.g., neighborhood), there is little research investigating the predictors of this emotional bond. This paper reports the results of a pair of studies that sought to identify the psychological factors most strongly associated with home attachment. In Study 1, participants (n = 285) provided written descriptions of the psychological benefits and costs they experience in their home. Content analysis revealed a number of common themes in these responses. Of these, home attachment was predicted positively by descriptions of the home's restorative properties and negatively by descriptions of social conflict and a lack of adequate space. In Study 2, a new sample of participants (n = 375) evaluated their home on Likert scale items modeled on the key themes of Study 1, which were then used to predict both home and neighborhood attachment. Here, restorative emotional experiences, positive social interactions, and an adequate amount of physical space were all uniquely predictive of home attachment. This pair of studies provide convergent evidence for the psychological features of the home most predictive of attachment.

This study addresses the urgent need to decrease meat consumption by untangling in which situations urban citizens opt for vegetarian meals over meals that include meat. To do so, this study applies ecological momentary assessment (EMA) over three subsequent weeks with a sample of 82 participants and 1449 daily meal choices. Results indicate a significant association between individuals’ vegetarian meal choices and factors such as meal type, meal location, and presence of others – for instance, vegetarian meals are more likely to be eaten at breakfast, when people are at home, or when they are alone. Furthermore, individuals are much more likely to eat vegetarian when others in their company also eat a vegetarian meal. Beyond these physical and social contexts, the study finds that the likelihood of eating vegetarian decreases when people are happy, and increases when people are more relaxed in the meal situation. Based on these findings, the study offers practical recommendations for interventions targeting situations highly associated with meat consumption and calls for future research on causal evidence.

Reverse correlation (RC) is a data-driven method from social psychology that has been effectively shown to visualize the mental representations that humans hold regarding facial attributes. The method helps to understand what features are relevant in terms of the evaluation of faces, such as dominance or submissiveness. To the best of our knowledge, RC has solely been applied to faces within the area of psychology until this point. However, there are many other areas where it is of interest to understand how humans evaluate and visualize content, one of them being the evaluation of house facades. With this work, we extended the application of RC to architectural design, specifically focusing on the evaluation of house facades with respect to the psychological attributes of facelikeness, invitingness, and likeability. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to create the base image, by utilizing a generative adversarial network. In an online study with a between-subject design, 121 participants completed the RC task, with 40 to 41 participants assigned to each of the three attributes. The resulting classification images (CIs) from the RC task unveil face-related features for the attribute facelikeness, signifying the potential extension of the RC methodology beyond the established domain of facial analysis to other domains, such as architectural design.

Theories of parallel memory systems suggest that flexible wayfinding (e.g., shortcutting) requires knowledge about the spatial structure of an environment, whereas automatic wayfinding (e.g., route-following) does not. Distal landmarks have widely been assumed to promote learning a spatial representation of an environment and, thus, flexible wayfinding through it. There is, however, little behavioural evidence to corroborate this assumption. In three experiments reported here, participants learned a circuitous route through a large-scale virtual garden maze, after which they completed orientation and wayfinding tests that measured their knowledge of the spatial structure of the environment and ability to shortcut through it, respectively. In Experiment 1, we found no evidence of a benefit to navigation in the presence versus the absence of distal landmarks when participants had continuous experience of the learned route, but pointing accuracy and shortcutting ability decreased when the learned route was complex compared to simple. In Experiment 2, participants learned a simple circuitous route in segments, and we observed superior knowledge of how the separately learned local spaces were aligned in the presence versus the absence of distal landmarks. Across all experiments, consistent with parallel memory systems, we observed that knowledge of the spatial structure of the environment was related to shortcutting but not route-following. This pattern of data suggests that distal landmarks promote the integration of separately learned local spaces into a coherent global representation, but do not promote learning of local spaces beyond what can be achieved by tracking self-motion.