Environmental Psychology, Overview☆

Environmental Psychology, Overviewq Mirilia Bonnes, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Giuseppe Carrus, RomaTre University of Rome, Rome, Italy Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction The Historical and Conceptual Backgrounds of Environmental Psychology Environmental Psychology Within and Around the Psychological Tradition Environmental Psychology and Other Environmental Fields The Main Areas of Interest of Current Environmental Psychology Spatial Behavior and Social Space Environmental Cognition, Cognitive Mapping and Wayfinding Environmental Stress, Extreme Environments and Restorative Environments Environmental Perception: Preference, Evaluation, Appraisal and Assessment Environmental Concern, Environmentally Friendly Behaviors, and Natural Resources Use and Conservation Place-Specific Environmental Psychology Workplaces: Factories, Offices Schools Cities The Future of Environmental Psychology References

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Glossary Affordances Characteristics of environmental objects that are related to both their physical properties and the possible actions that each perceiver can perform with them. Conservation behaviors Actions that contribute to environmental preservation anc1/or conservation. Environmental stressors Physical characteristics of the environment that produce stress. Hawthorne effect An increase of work productivity deriving from the rise worker’s awareness of being monitored by an external observer. Participatory governance The transfer of authority and responsibility from those who hold power by virtue of law, con-tract, or organizational role to those not so empowered. Personal space The emotionally tinged zone around the human body that people feel is “their” space. Place The product of physical properties of a defined environment, people’s cognitions and affects about this environment, and people’s actions in that environment.

Place attachment An affective bond between an individual and a particular place that is not interchangeable with another with the same functional quality. Privacy regulation The selective control of access to the self or to one’s group. Residential satisfaction The experience of pleasure or gratification deriving from living in a specific place. Restoration The process of renewing, recovering, or reestablishing physical, psychological, and social resources or capabilities diminished in ongoing efforts to meet adaptive demands. Social dilemma A situation of intrinsic conflict between the pursuing of individual gains and the maximization of collective outcomes. Spatial cognition The internalized reflection and reconstruction of space in thought. Sustainable development Development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising those of the future. Territory A fixed geographical space, marked and defended by an organism and used for life-sustaining activities.

q Change History: December 2015. Mirilia Bonnes updated the entire text and References section. This article is an updated and revised version of the overview introductory chapter to the Environmental Psychology Section (composed by 15 other thematic chapters), edited by the authors, as Section Editors of the 3 volumes Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, published by Academic Press (S. Diego, CA), on 2004, with C. Spilberger as general editor: Bonnes, M. and Carrus, G. Environmental Psychology, Overview. (pp. 801–814).

Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.05554-1

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Environmental Psychology, Overview

Introduction Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that studies the relationship between people and the physical features of daily life environmentsdboth built and natural environmentsd, in order to enhance human well-being and to improve people–environment relations. It emerged as an autonomous field of scientific inquiry at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s. The main conceptual roots of environmental psychology can be found in various theoretical proposals within psychology, all of them underlining the ecological or transactional basis and the context–specificity of human psychological processes. The emergence of environmental psychology is also related to the need for responding to specific demands from other technical and disciplinary fields, such as architecture and natural–ecological sciences, that face the problem of designing and managing the physical features of people’s everyday environments. Due to the influence of these different factors, present–day environmental psychology can be characterized by four distinctive aspects: (1) the attention paid to the physical characteristics of the environment where human behavior occurs; (2) the wide variety of the research methods adopted; (3) the interest in problems with a clear social relevance; and (4) the interdisciplinary collaboration with other environmental fields. The first part of this article briefly outlines the basic historical and conceptual backgrounds of environmental psychology as a scientific discipline. Then, the main areas of interest and the related outcomes of current environmental psychology are briefly reviewed. Finally, same perspectives on the future developments of environmental psychology are summarized.

The Historical and Conceptual Backgrounds of Environmental Psychology The starting date of environmental psychology as an autonomous disciplinary field within psychological science is commonly placed at the end of the 1950s. The environmental psychology that was formed during the 1950 and 1960s focused its attention on the physical features of the environment in which human behavior occurs. Its aim was to better understand the relationship between human behavior and the everyday physical or socio–physical environment. This environment was considered to be directly perceptible through the sensory organs, and was defined and considered in spatial and physical terms, whether built or natural, or on a small or large scale. Two contrasting ideas, or research paradigms,, about the relationship between human behavior and the physical environment, can be noted in this early environmental psychology. On the one hand, human behavior was conceived of as the “result” of the physical environment, particularly when the built-up physical environment was considered. On the other hand, human behavior was conceived of as a “cause” of the physical environment, particularly when the natural environment was considered. However, this distinction was increasingly overcome by environmental psychology’s growing emphasis on the necessity of adopting a transactional approach in the study of person–environment relationships and a place-specific view on the psychological processes involved. Various converging factors, originating inside, around, and outside the psychological field, contributed to the emergence and development of environmental psychology. The origin, the past, and the present of this branch of psychology can be better understood by looking at all these factors in order to outline a disciplinary identity that goes beyond the general label of applied psychology: a more detailed illustration on these points can be found in: Altman (1988), Bonnes and Secchiaroli (1995), Bonnes et al. (2003) and Gifford (2014).

Environmental Psychology Within and Around the Psychological Tradition Psychology has been traditionally interested in environment–behavior interactions in a very general way. The major interest of environmental psychology rested on the discovery of the importance of the physical and spatial dimension of the environment as a constituting part of human actions and experience. This interest emerged within a wider ecological or transactional perspective coming from various domains of psychological inquiry. Therefore, environmental psychology has always been concerned on the spatial–physical properties of the surroundings in which human behavior occurs, that is, of its physical setting. At the same time, it stressed the importance of considering these physical properties in a “molar” rather than “molecular” sense. It is also important to stress that the influence of the physical environment on human psychological processes often remains outside our individual and collective awareness. Some pioneering studies in psychology highlighted the importance of the physical and spatial context in shaping human behavior, albeit often as an incidental outcome or a small part of other research aims. An example is the widely cited field experiments, conduced at the Western Electric Company by Elton Mayo in the 1930s, that investigated the effects of the lighting conditions in work settings upon workers’ performance: these effects then became famous as Hawthorn effect. Other pioneering works are the studies on the development of social influence networks by Festinger et al. (1950) and colleagues and the analysis of the “stream” of human behavior in natural settings by Roger Barker (1968) and colleagues. All of these earlier contributions were guided by a common methodological interest in studying human behavior in its natural setting, as researchers recognized the need for overcoming the usually low external validity of the traditional laboratory experiments. To this end, they preferred methods such as field experiments or nonobtrusive observation. Other authors also played a crucial role in the emergence of environmental psychology, especially those who were more open to receive and develop ideas coming from areas that bordered on psychology, but that were traditionally interested in studying behavior in natural contexts. Areas such as cultural anthropology, about human proxemics, animal ethology, and microsociology are some examples. In other words, in order to be concerned with the spatial–physical environment, psychology had to get out from

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its habitual setting (i.e., the research laboratory), which was by definition a “nonenvironment.” Just like as the earlier pioneers mentioned previously, these contributors also were generally opposed to the laboratory methods used by mainstream psychological research, and consequently were more willing to use other methodologies such as field experiments and field observations, both natural or systematic. Sommer (1969) and Altman (1975) studies on personal space and social behavior, which remain as cornerstones of the early environmental psychology, are good examples. The enthusiasm over the emergence of this new field of inquiry was then linked with the previously mentioned dissatisfaction for both the poor ecological validity and the low social relevance of much laboratory research. This resulted in a search for a “real world psychology,” as specifically claimed by Proshanky (1976) This frequent dissatisfaction can be traced to the various forms of ecological demand raised since the 1940 and 1950s by various authors and psychological schools, which later developed into what has been called “contextualism” or “contextual revolution.” This revolution is certainly at the core of the development of environmental psychology, particularly in its transactional–contextual approach, which has characterized environmental psychology since its beginning, as also recently variously pointed out: i.e., Helft (2012); Bonnes (2014). Initially, the increased awareness of the crucial effect played by the physical features of the everyday environment on human behavior was based on two main theoretical psychological traditions. The first is the psychology of perception, especially in its more ecological orientations, such as the lens model by Brunswik (1943), the transactional school of the Princeton group, by Ittelson et al. (1974) and the ecological approach to perception of Gibson (1966). Gibson, for example, introduced the neologism affordances, which identifies the physical proper ties of environmental objects that are related to the possible actions that can be performed with them. The second psychological tradition is based on social psychology, through the pioneering work of K. Lewin, E. Tolman, R. Barker, and U. Bronfenbrenner. It embraces a more “holistic” or “molar” perspective, which later developed into the transactional–contextual approach to person–environment relationships, as systematically outlined by many contributors to the first Handbook of Environmental Psychology (Stokols et al., 1987). In this perspective, the physical environment or physical setting has been increasingly considered as a socio-physical environment, with a growing emphasis on the social aspects of both the physical environment and the psychological processes involved. The notion of place, and its related environmental–psychological processes, also became a central unit of analysis. Typically, places were defined from an environmental psychology point of view as a product of three main dimensions: physical properties, people’s cognitions including their affective-evaluative components, and people’s actions (Canter, 1977; Bonnes and Secchiaroli, 1995). Within this approach environmental psychology stressed the place-specific nature of human psychological processes in general with special attention to all place-based psychological processes, such in particular those of place attachment and place identity which received continuous attention in the field: Altman and Low, 1992, Giuliani, 2003; Scannell and Gifford, 2010; Korpela, 2012; Manzo and Dewin-Wright, 2013.

Environmental Psychology and Other Environmental Fields The problem-oriented demands rising in technical and disciplinary fields distant from psychology are also an important factor that contributed to the emerging of environmental psychology. Examples of these fields are architecture, engineering, urban planning, human geography, natural and bio-ecological sciences. On one hand, architects and engineers are concerned with problems regarding the relationships between people and the built or “human-made” environments; on the other hand, geographers and natural scientists are more interested in the relationships between people and the natural features of the environment. In architecture and urban planning, those who were dissatisfied with an egocentric approach to design desired to move toward a user-centered approach to design, as well as to move from “product” design and planning to processes design and planning. A seminal work in this area is that of the urban planner Kevin Lynch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His famous book The Image of the City, published in 1960, is considered a cornerstone of the collaboration between urban planning and environmental psychology. Lynch proposed that the point of view or the image that users form of the urban environment should be kept in mind when designing and planning urban spaces. Likewise, in engineering and technology, many scholars and practitioners became interested in the human-use dimension of technological systems. The collaboration between psychology and architecture was mainly guided by the place-specific approach, with interest in the influence of specific and localized spatial characteristics of the built-up environment on human behavior. This research field initially developed, especially in Europe, with also the denomination of architectural psychology. A different orientation, however, characterizes the interest in human behavior that arose in the fields of natural and bio-ecological sciences, which is the other main external domain contributing to the establishment of environmental psychology. Here, the focus was on ecosystems processes and functioning and thus on the possible (and usually negative) impact that human behavior has upon conditions of these ecosystems and of “natural” environment in particular, at both a local and a global or biospheric level. Therefore the importance of paying attention to the human dimension, considered at an individual, social and cultural level-of global environmental changes, such as the greenhouse effect and climate changes, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of the ozone layer, and so forth, was recognized. In parallel with the growing relevance of these environmental problems, ecological sciences also became increasingly aware of the need to integrate social and human sciences (thus also environmental psychology) into natural and bio-ecological sciences when dealing with environmental phenomena and with ecosystems sustainability issues (i.e., Di Castri et al., 1984). This trend became increasingly visible after United Nations launched on 1992, the Programme on Sustainable Development at the Rio Conference on Environment and Human Development. The growing interests of environmental psychology in topics such as environmental concern, proenvironmental values and attitudes, ecologically relevant, or environmentally friendly, behaviors, sustainable lifestyles, natural resource use and management, are a consequence of this increased trend, as illustrated by several authors: i.e., Bonnes and Bonaiuto (2002); Stern et al. (1992).

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This also brought some authors to consider this research area as a specific branch of environmental psychology, with the specific name of conservations psychology (Clayton, 2012).

The Main Areas of Interest of Current Environmental Psychology Contributions in environmental psychology can be grouped into five general domains: (1)spatial behavior and social space, (2) environmental cognition, cognitive mapping and way finding, (3) environmental stress, extreme environments and restoration (4) environmental perception: preferences, evaluation, appraisal and assessment, (5) environmental concern and environmental friendly behavior, natural resource use and conservation. In this article the main empirical results and outcomes for each of these five research domains will be briefly presented, by considering the environmental psychological processes, grouped into these five domains, as transverse to the variety of specific settings or places of everyday life experience. However, since environmental psychologists are increasingly interested in a number of specific places that have a particular impact on people everyday life and well-being -, such as offices, schools, houses, stores, hospitals, museums, prisons, cities, etc.-, some examples of this approach will be given in the last part of this article, by focusing on three particularly important places in our everyday experience: the workplace, the school, and the city.

Spatial Behavior and Social Space The concept of spatial behavior relates to how individuals regulate and use (in terms of appropriation and defense) their spatial environments -at different personal, interpersonal, and group levels. Environmental psychology interested in spatial behavior focuses on the role of the spatial properties of the environment in shaping and regulating social interaction in everyday situations; thus on how the everyday physical spatial environment is becoming a social space (Gifford, 2014). Four major concepts -and related environmental psychological processes-are characterizing this research domain, with important implications for people daily life experience and behaviors: territoriality, personal space, privacy, and crowding. This research domain encompass the variety of strategies by which people and communities set up and regulate the spatial boundaries of their living environment (territoriality) and the very personal sphere of the amount of space we put between us and the others (personal space). The concept of privacy encompasses both of these aspects, as it refers more generally to the various personal and group-based processes through which people set and control their mutual closeness in daily interactions. According to the early studies of Sommer (1969), territoriality is the spatial appropriation, marking, and defense of our living spaces Following an evolutionary orientation, territories can be defined as those spatial areas that deserve to be defended from external intruders. As more recently pointed out by Sommer (2004b) the concept of territoriality has several relevant outcomes for the architectural and urban planning domain. In particular an intriguing issue connected with human territoriality is that of crime prevention, through the concept, of defensible space, early proposed by Newman (1972). There is a widely documented negative correlation between the presence of physical and symbolic territorial markers (e.g., well-maintained dwellings, tended yards, signs of occupancy) and the likelihood of criminal intrusion and vandalism in residential areas. The relationship between the presence of markers and crime, may be mediated by several important social variables. Notably, clear territorial markers are related to stronger residential identification, place attachment, sense of community, and higher feelings of safety among residents. Thus, architectural defensive features might play an indirect role in reducing the likelihood of crime. They reflect and communicate strengthened community-based ties and greater social cohesion; these make potential intruders less willing to perpetrate criminal activities. Some other important outcomes of the concept of territoriality are related to urban planning: for example some specific design features, encouraging residents’ identification with and control over a specific territory, may promote its proper maintenance Furthermore, common areas such as urban parks or playgrounds should not be placed between the territories of rival gangs, as they would then run the risk of being abandoned and vandalized. Other domains in which the study of human territoriality has offered useful insights are sport (as sport teams perform better on their home field), police investigations (as many criminal gangs mark their territories by the use of graffiti and other symbols), and environmental conflict resolution (as the creation of ad hoc territories reserved to different stakeholders may prevent the emergence of land use disputes), as pointed out by Sommer (2004b). While territoriality is a typical site-related, or place-based, concept, personal space is a person-related concept, thus a trans-place psychological concept. It is defined by Sommer (1969), in his seminal studies, as these invisible boundaries, surrounding a person’s body into which intruders may not come: that is, as an emotionally tinged area that people desire to maintain around themselves and that they feel is “their space”. Various individual, situational, group, and cultural factors are regulating personal space, which has important implications for several domains of human–environment interaction, as more recently pointed out by Sommer (2004a). For example, the personal space concept has provided insights for the design of institutional settings with fixed seating, as well as in the domain of mass transportation. Likewise, issues regarding personal space were incorporated in the design of public or semi-public settings (e.g., offices, stores, banks). These should be set up in order to provide spaces that leave the users as free as possible to shift among different degrees of desired mutual closeness. Many guidebooks describing the appropriate spacing in different social encounters are also available. For example, salesman are trained about how their selling activities might profit from an appropriate spatial interaction with customers. The issue of personal space has serious implications also for the legal field: for example, the invasion of personal space has been an issue in court cases concerning prison crowding and sexual harassment. It is also an aspect

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considered during jury selection in high-profile trials, where professional consultants advise lawyers in order to detect potentially biased jurors, as noted by Sommer (2004a). Personal space and territoriality are both involved in the more general concept of privacy regulation. In this sense, they can be seen as two different strategies that people use to regulate their privacy, and through which people strive for psychologically satisfactory level of openness or closeness to others, as well pointed out by Werner et al. (2004). A seminal contribution to the definition of privacy in environmental psychology comes from Altman (1975), who defines it as the process of selectively controlling access to one’s self and proposes to treats privacy as a dialectic process: that is, people might avoid or seek social contact, depending on the specific situation they are in. An important consequent point is that individuals feel more comfortable when allowed to be as open or as closed to the others as they desire. This is also related to another important issue in the environmental psychology of spatial behavior, that is, crowding, which is defined as one’s perception that there are too many people present in a given space or situation. The possibility of a proper privacy regulation becomes particularly important and also very critical when people experience crowding . In fact environmental psychology is treating crowding as a specific environmental stressor, similarly to others such noise, air pollution, too high or too cold temperature (i.e., Evans and Coen, 2004) Environmental psychology has identified a number of physical features that either allow people to experience a satisfactory regulation of privacy or do not, thus the privacy concept has many practical implications for the design of various specific environments such as workplaces, schools, prisons, hospitals, and public residences. For example, university dormitories designed as suites or apartments can promote the formation of small subgroups of occupants; this is meant to buffer the possible negative consequences of crowding upon the possibility of privacy regulation. When designing the layout of a home, architects should place rooms that are usually considered more private (e.g., the bedrooms, or the family bath-rooms) far from the entrance. Likewise, privacy-related concepts have been applied to urban planning and community development. For example, public spaces provided with design features encouraging interpersonal contacts (e.g., streets that invite walking, tree-shaded streets, low speed limits, green areas), might be used to promote strengthened community bonds and social ties among neighbors. Beyond the effect that specific design features can have in affording or impeding people’s mutual interactions, a central factor in people’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with privacy conditions is the possibility of regulation and control. A general recommendation is that the physical environment should be designed in order to provide to its users the possibility of regulating privacy, by seeking or avoiding social contact according to their situational and personal needs and desires, as suggested by Werner et al. (2004).

Environmental Cognition, Cognitive Mapping and Wayfinding Since its beginning, environmental psychology has focused on the relationship between cognitive processes and physical space. The study of spatial cognition has developed inside environmental psychology as a wide multidisciplinary area, involving collaboration of psychological sciences (e.g., cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology) with several other disciplinary and technical fields, such as geography, anthropology, architecture and urban planning and computer sciences, as noted by a pioneer in this domain as Gooledge (2004). A core concept for environmental psychology of spatial cognition is cognitive mapping. This term refers to the process of mentally acquiring, representing, storing, and using information about the spatial properties of the physical surroundings and the relations among its constitutive elements. The interest in cognitive maps in psychology can be traced back to the works of Tolman in 1948. Studies on cognitive mapping are focused on the different kinds of information people rely on when forming a map of a given spatial setting. Studies on cognitive mapping are dealing with the representation of large-scale urban environments, as well as with the representation of the interior of buildings. One goal of this kind of research is to investigate how to aid people’s orientation, memory of places, and wayfinding in complex environments; for a recent review on the domain, see A. Devlin (2012). Kevin Lynch’s seminal book The Image of the City (1960) influenced several ensuing works on the formation of mental maps of urban settings. Urban planners can use principles highlighted by these studies in order to design urban spaces that are capable of facilitating people’s orientation in the city. For example, some spatial features of the residential environment, such as spatial prominence, sharp contours of buildings, easy accessibility, and the presence of natural surroundings might facilitate the overall comprehension and use of neighborhoods. Likewise, principles drawn from the cognitive mapping literature have been used for aiding wayfinding in complex interior structures, such as university buildings, hospitals, or museums. The presence of proper signs (floor plans, large graphic aids) and the availability of visual accesses may be effective in enhancing users’ proper orientation (i.e., Holscher et al., 2006). There is now a growing interest in the study of spatial cognition in aged people, due to the increased trend of aging in western societies and the growing concern for the quality of life of older people. Research in this field is therefore devoted to trying to identify how the layout of the physical space can be designed and managed in order to buffer the declines in spatial competence associated with aging and the negative consequences of this decline for the safety, effectiveness and autonomy of the elderly. This also with specific attention for people affected by dementia or by Alzheimer’s disease (i.e., Passini et al., 2000; Zeisel,2009).

Environmental Stress, Extreme Environments and Restorative Environments The environment in which most of humankind currently lives is often characterized by the presence of several potentially adverse physical conditions that can be a chronic, powerful, and uncontrollable source of psychological distress, such as noise, air pollution, crowding, extreme high or cold temperature. Environmental stressors can be defined as those actual or perceived adverse

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properties of the physical environment that are capable of producing a negative (physiologically and psychologically costly) effect upon a person. The study of human response to some specific environmental stressors has a long tradition in environmental psychology; such in particular the study on noise effects (i.e., Stewart et al., 2011; Stramsfeld et al., 2012). However it is important to note that one’s every-day environment is often a source of simultaneous and interdependent multiple stressors, as well pointed out by G. Evans and S. Cohen (2004), among the main experts on this domain of environmental psychology. The effects of different environmental stressors frequently add or interact with each other and individuals must make a remarkable adaptive effort in order to cope with such adverse conditions. Because humans have great powers of adaptation in adopting strategies to cope with stressors, the coping activity may become a stressful condition itself, particularly in the long-term. Four main costs of adapting to poor environmental conditions can be distinguished: cumulative fatigue, learned helplessness, physiological mobilization, and overgeneralization. These adaptive costs are caused by chronic exposure to a number of different environmental stressors, such as crowding, noise, or pollution. Some of these main environmental stressors can be a very common experience for a great number of people, in particular for residents of cities (i.e., Moser, 2012) Conversely, there are other critical environmental conditions that are very uncommon and they are also of interest to environmental psychologists, under the definition of extreme environments (Bechtel, 2004; Suedfeld, 2012). There are two principal classifications of extreme environments. On the one hand, there are permanent extreme environments, such as high mountains, deserts, cold regions, and jungles, and on the other hand, there are temporary extreme environments, such as Antarctic polar stations, space shuttles, and simulation laboratories. As noted by R. Bechtel (2004), among the main experts in this field of studies, the main goal of environmental psychology concerned with these extreme environments is to better understand how human mental function and behavior can be affected by these kinds of environmental conditions in order to buffer their potentially negative impact on mental function: that is, how to make these environments less extreme for their users. In recent decades, environmental psychology has also addressed stress-related issues from an opposite view-point: that is, how the physical environment can restore human mental functions, and therefore promote psychological well-being. Restorative environments are those that not only permit, but promote, restoration, where restoration is defined as the process of recovering physical, psychological, and social resources being diminished by efforts to adapt to external demands. In fact a considerable amount of empirical research has demonstrated the existence of specific environmental conditions capable of positively affecting people’s feelings of well-being, although different theoretical elaborations have been proposed to explain it. Perhaps the most well-documented effect within this area of research is that natural settings appear to be more restorative than built-up ones, because they stimulate people’s interest and provide people with the possibility of being away from their usual experience. Furthermore, natural environments are highly restorative because of various specific features, such as visual depth and visual complexity. This is well outlined by T. Hartig (2004),- a pioneer on this domain of environmental psychology- and more recently by H. Staatz (2012). Research on restorative environments can have high relevance also for the design of health care places (i.e., see Fornara and Andrade, 2012). A widely cited study by R. Ulrich, published in Science in 1984, showed that providing hospital patients with the possibility of contact with nature (even just visual contact) might positively impact the effects of medical therapies. Restorativeness is a relevant issue for the domain of urban planning as well. Setting up urban green areas that are easily accessible to urban dwellers can provide them with more frequent opportunities for psychological restoration in a highly stressful environment such as the city: for a recent review on this topic, see Wells and Rollings (2012).

Environmental Perception: Preference, Evaluation, Appraisal and Assessment Environmental perception is a very wide research domain for environmental psychology, encompassing several areas of study, including environmental preferences, evaluations, appraisals and assessments. Theoretical and conceptual distinctions are proposed between, environmental assessment on one hand and, on the other hand environmental appraisal, preferences and evaluations: the former being more place-centered, the others being more person-centered. All these aspects are considered by environmental psychology, within a large amount of empirical contributions and theoretical models aimed at answering very important questions. For example, how do people evaluate, judge, or express preference for different kinds of environments? How do the physical features of a setting interact with people’s personal and social characteristics when they evaluate an environment? In particular, which physical properties of the environment are related to positive evaluations and which are related to negative ones? Furthermore, what are the individual and group differences that may lead to different environmental preferences and evaluations? And also, how do cognitive and affective judgments interact when a certain environment is evaluated? Generally speaking, different affective qualities have been found to characterize different perceived environments. These qualities vary according to two main bipolar axes, pleasure (pleasant/unpleasant) and arousal (high/low). The physical surroundings of people’s everyday lives can generate positive or negative emotions in terms of the pleasure they afford to the perceiver, or in terms of the amount of arousal they provide to the perceiver (Russell and Pratt, 1980). According to a more cognitive model, proposed by Kaplan (1989, 1998), there are four main physical characteristics predicting the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an environmental setting: coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery. Coherence and complexity are two features of environmental scenes that immediately strike the perceiver. Conversely, legibility and mystery are two features that can be inferred after viewing an environmental scene for more time. The Kaplans’ model also offered interesting insights into the study of landscape preference and of natural landscape in particular (Scopelliti et al., 2012). Whether a setting will generate positive or negative emotions in its users/perceivers is also a function of the prior state of the perceiver him- or her-self. People’s affective appraisal of a given environment is an adaptive process, in the sense that it is a function

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of both the properties of the environment and the characteristics of the perceiver. For example, high sensation seekers prefer highly arousing environmental scenes, and vice versa. Several studies have also showed that natural environments are usually preferred to built environments by a large number of subjects. This preference seems to be consistent across different cultures, genders, ages, and so forth. Regardless if they are evaluated in terms of general preference, aesthetic beauty, or perceived restorativeness, natural landscapes are judged more positively than built settings (Hartig, 2004). The presence of water in an environment is also positively judged (White et al., 2010). Moreover, as previously mentioned, exposure to natural views has been proved to have positive effects upon physiological and cognitive indicators, such as the relief of mental fatigue, or the stress recovering in general, including the rapidity of healing after hospitalization Such a nature favoritism, or biophilia, has been first of all explained in evolutionary terms: people are still attracted by nature because it provided sources of sustenance and shelter in the earlier stages of human evolution. The psychological benefits of contact with nature can be due to the fact that evolution favored those who could benefit more from exposure to nature. However this environmental restorativeness was more recently shown to happen also in the experience of some nonnatural environments (Scopelliti and Giuliani, 2009; Herzog et al., 2010): for a recent review on this domain see H. Staatz (2012). Despite this apparently generalized nature favoritism, a limited degree of human intervention within a natural environment is associated with positive evaluations. That is, scenes in which the human presence is visible (although not too intrusive) are usually preferred to scenes of total wilderness. This leads to the importance of another factor in shaping environmental evaluations: perceived environmental control. People tend to judge more positively those environments that they perceive as controllable, compared to those that they perceive as uncontrollable Typically, the perception of control is associated with higher perceived safety. For these reasons perception of nature may be also not restorativedwhen in particular it is seen as potential danger (because of storms, flooding, temperature extremes and other possible ‘ natural disasters: Herzog and Rector, 2009)dor also as a source of ambivalent feelings, such in particular in urban areas, as pointed out by Bonnes et al. (2011). Speaking more generally, environmental evaluation could be conceived of as a function of the perceived cognitive, affective, and behavioral fit between the characteristics of the person (e.g., needs, goals, values, expectations) and the actual physical properties of the environment. In other words, people will prefer those environments they see as matching their needs, goals, and expectancies in that specific context at that given time. The psychological processes driving environmental perceptions and evaluations are relevant for the study of residential preference and satisfaction. Several studies have pointed out the multidimensional nature of residential preference and satisfaction, given the tendency of people to combine different aspects when judging the quality of a residential setting (Marans, 2003; Bonaiuto, 2004; Fornara et al., 2010). At a macro-level (e.g., the neighborhood) these aspects are related to (1) the physical and aesthetic characteristics of residential areas, (2) the social relations that people can establish in a specific residential area, and (3) the actions and behaviors that people can perform in a specific residential area. At a micro-level (e.g., the home) these aspects are related to (1) the quality of the interior arrangement and decoration of the house,(2) the specific architectural style of the house, and (3) the location of the house, in terms of both proximity to functional services and distance from the city center (Giuliani, 2004). An important outcome of these studies on environmental perception, with focus on the assessment of residential environments, has been the development of psychometric tools for the measurement of environmental preference and satisfaction, such as Perceived Environmental Quality Indicators (PEQis). Because environmental quality assessment is conceived as a multidimensional process, PEQis should encompass a sufficient variety of dimensions: the most widely shared qualities are aesthetics, functionality, safety, social relations, noise and pollution, and green spaces: for a wide recent review on this topic, see Bonaiuto and Alves (2012). The information gathered through these tools can often represent the first step in developing more inclusive and participatory methods in environmental design and planning, which are considered in general very important by environmental psychology (Sanoff, 2000; Churchman,2002, 2012). But why is including user’s perspective or letting people take part in decisions considered so important in the environmental domain, as well in many other domains? The major argument in favor of public participation in environmental design and management is that it enables decisions that better fit the needs of the people. The positive consequences of this better fit are twofold, as both public support for environmental policies and people’s care for a proper maintenance of their environments will be more likely. Nonetheless several factors may prevent the effective implementation of participatory processes in the environmental domain, as pionted out by Churchman and Sadam (2004). For example, public leaders and politicians sometimes may see participation as a threat to their power. A crucial role is thus assigned to environmental psychology in promoting and supporting participatory processes in environmental design, planning, and management. These aspects seem particularly relevant also to the issue of improving the processes of inclusive environmental governance, which is currently seen as a crucial goal by many international and intergovernmental authorities.

Environmental Concern, Environmentally Friendly Behaviors, and Natural Resources Use and Conservation A shared belief among the scientific community and among public opinion is that the quality of our environment at the local and global level has rapidly decreased almost everywhere in the last decades. As a matter of fact, the major reason for that progressive and often dramatic deterioration is the impact of many human activities and rapid industrial growth on the ecosystems. Therefore, the healthy or unhealthy state of the environment primarily depends, and will depend in the future, on those human activities that can cause relevant and often irreversible environmental local and global changes, such as for example climate change. In order to deal with these kind of problems, environmental psychology, during the last decades, has increasingly addressed the issue of environmental concern and related environmental friendly behaviors (also defined as pro-environmental behaviors or conservation behavior), by

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focusing on the psychological factors driving various forms of behavioral choices contributing to environmental preservation, or conservation, such as energy saving, recycling, water saving, biodiversity protection, etc: i.e., Kaiser, 2004, Shultz, 2011; Clayton et al., 2015a. As pointed out by P. Stern (2000), people’s conservation behaviors can be approached from two rather different perspectives. Conservation behavior, in fact, can be defined either from an observer’s or from an actor’s viewpoint The first implies a focus on the consequences for the environment and considers apparently similar actions (e.g., recycling paper and recycling used batteries) as distinct behaviors. The second perspective focuses more directly on the human intentions and related motivations driving conservation behaviors and groups even apparently different actions (e.g., recycling glass and owning solar panels) into the same behavioral category. This second approach is more directly linked to the psychological perspective. On the contrary, a too strict focus on environmental consequences may lead to underestimating the psychological determinants of conservation actions, which are at the core of this research domain. But what are the psychological determinants of environmentally friendly behaviors? The main focuses of this wide research domain is on the relationship between environmentally friendly attitudes and behaviors: that is, the congruence or incongruence between what people believe and feel and how they behave toward the environment: for recent review on this issue see Gifford and Sussman, 2012. Pro-environmental attitudes are increasingly shared by many people in western societies Some social structural variables (e.g., age, gender, level of education, place of residence, political orientation) appear to be related with this concern. Typically, young, female, highly educated, urban, and liberally oriented subjects express a stronger concern for the environment. The increased concern for environmental issues has been summed up by the concept, early introduced by R. Dunlap and K. Van Liere at the end of the 1970s and further confirmed (Dunlap et al., 2000), of a new environmental paradigm (NEP). The core idea of NEP is that an increased number of people are developing a new perspective toward the environment, based on the belief that the state of the earth’s ecosystems is becoming more and more precarious, therefore compromising human survival. However, people often do not coherently translate such a positive concern into consequent proenvironmental behaviors. The reason for this lack of correspondence are explained in different ways. Two important social psychological models of attitudebehavior relations are often considered for this aim, as also outlined by H. Staatz (2004): the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The basic tenet of these models is that the relation between attitudes and behaviors is mediated or moderated by other variables, such as behavioral intentions and perceived behavioral control. TRA and TPB have been applied, sometimes successfully and other times less successfully, to several environmentally relevant behavioral domains, such as waste recycling, travel modes, water use, energy use, and green consumerism. At any rate, the role of variables other than attitudes seems to be crucial for explaining proenvironmental actions: among them there are past behaviors and habits, environmental knowledge, social and personal norms, and value orientations. Well-established habits are often difficult to quit, even when their performers are aware of the possible negative consequences for the environment. Likewise, a lack of specific knowledge about environmental issues, or about the environmental consequences of a specific behavior, may function as a barrier to proenvironmental actions: people are in fact frequently unaware of, or uncertain about, the actual state of the environment and the negative consequences of their behaviors on it. For example, a deeper knowledge of environmental issues seems to distinguish committed environmental activists from the general public, although it is difficult to state whether knowledge comes before activism, or vice versa. Both social and personal norms are also related to proenvironmental behaviors (Schultz et al., 2007) Although some explicit proenvironmental norms are socially shared, people might not always behave according to these social norms, especially because several, some times conflicting, norms can be present at the same time in a given situation(i.e., Fornara et al., 2011). In particular, the divergence between prescriptive (what is explicitly prescribed) and descriptive (what is observed in others’ behaviors) social norms can hamper proenvironmental actions. A series of interesting experiments conduced by R. Cialdini and his colleagues showed that the context in which prescriptive and descriptive norms are framed and made salient can account for a particular environmental behavior such as littering (Cialdini et al., 1991). The role of values and ethical principles in shaping pro environmental behaviors has been explored as well (Steg and De Goat, 2012; Steg et al., 2014). A distinction has been proposed between two major value orientations about environmental issues: ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. Ecocentric people value environmental preservation for its own sake; conversely, anthropocentric people value environmental preservation because of the positive consequence that it can have upon human well-being. The former are more likely to behave coherently with their proenvironmental attitudes compared to the latter, even when this implies some personal or economic cost. But what are better methods for the promotion of environmentally responsible behaviors and for the prevention of environmentally adverse behaviors? Various possible strategies are considered as effective to this end, as illustrated by several authors: Steg and Vlek, 2009; Stokols et al., 2009; Shultz and Kaiser, 2012. As pointed out by H. Staatz (2004) these strategies can be distinguished, a being, informationbased (e.g., communication campaigns, education, advertising), incentive-based (e.g., monetary rewards/punishments), prescription-based (e.g., laws, rules, regulations), or community-based (e.g., public involvement and participatory programs). Different kinds of behaviors in different contexts deserve different kinds of strategies. Furthermore there are some basic principles to be followed for enhancing the likelihood of changing environmentally relevant behaviors: the use of mixed intervention strategies, the adoption of an actor’s perspective, the constant monitoring of programs, and the promotion of public participation. The models trying to explain the lack of correspondence between proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors, as briefly reviewed above, rely on the role of various factors that could interfere with the supposed positive association between attitudes and behaviors. This theoretical position, however, may not adequately account for other social and societal processes involved in peopleenvironment relations, in particular, the mutual interdependency of people’s actions in the environment. A theoretical approach that delves more directly into this direction is the social dilemma paradigm (Dawes and Messick, 2000; Van Vugt, 2002; Gifford, 2008). Social dilemmas (SDs) are situations in which two or more people are faced with a choice between pursuing individual gains

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or maximizing collective benefits: if everyone (or too many) chooses the former option, everyone is worse off than they would be if everyone (or sufficiently many) chose the latter. In other words, in an SD, the interest of a single person is in conflict with a more general collective interest, and one is faced with a choice between a defective (or selfish) option and a cooperative (or altruistic) alternative. Such a conflicting situation often exists in the environmental field when individual and collective interests clash over the exploitation of a limited natural resource. These dilemmas are usually referred to as commons dilemmas. Almost every environmental problem can be framed and approached as a commons dilemma situation; most of the times the individual-collective conflict in the exploitation of a limited resource has a temporal dimension as well. That is, maximizing individual gains in the short term will result in a collective loss in the long run (the common resource will be extinguished); conversely, limiting the individual gains in the short term will result in a collective benefit in the long run (the common resource will be guaranteed). This process is at the core of the political concept of sustainable development and has been well illustrated by G. Hardin in his famous 1968 article entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” On the basis of the SD paradigm, it is not surprising that people frequently find out that behaving in an environmentally negative way is in the short term more advantageous, easier, more comfortable, less costly, and so forth. To an extreme extent, in many daily situations, environmentally unfriendly behaviors are the rule and not the exception. Several environmentally relevant psychological processes and behaviors can be considered under the point of view of this SD framework. For example, as proposed by C. Vlek (2004), it seems possible to bridge the issue of environmental risk, seen as a collective risk, with the domain of individual risk perception and risk taking. In particular is possible to show that many collective risks for the environment are often the result of the summed external negative effects of numerous individually advantageous activities. To this extent, the SD paradigm is directly called into question, as it shows how the minimization of environmental collective risks and the maximization of individual benefits may be incompatible goals in many everyday situations. Other examples into this sense can be found in various daily life behaviors, such for example in the domain of motorized transportation, where the increasing trend of private car use in urban areas is posing serious threats to the global environment and to the health and well-being of urban dwellers. These threats are overwhelming the individual benefits of the single car users. As shown by T. Garling (2004), the choice of whether to shift from private to public motorized transportation systems or from motorized to unmotorized vehicles can be framed as a social dilemma for many car and motorbike drivers. Also the possible policy measures aiming at reducing private car use among urban dwellers can be seen as attempts to solve that dilemma. But which are the main factors orienting our choices in social dilemma situations? Three crucial components of SDs are information, communication, and social identification. The possibility of monitoring others’ behaviors and the possibility of communication may promote cooperation (Van Vugt et al., 2000). Likewise, high social identification may result in stronger cooperation although the opposite may be true. In fact, when a dilemma involves two or more groups competing for the same resource, identification with a specific group may result in diminished cooperation. These aspects may also have relevant implications for legitimizing and facilitating the acceptance of authority structures regulating citizens’ environmental behaviors in our societies. The way a situation is structured by the authorities and interpreted by the individuals acting in it is crucial for approaching environmental dilemmas. An example can be found in the domain of biodiversity conservation. Here, highly centralized environmental policies (e.g., land use regulations, designations of National Parks) can represent a dilemma in the perception of local stakeholders (i.e., Carrus et al., 2005) A strong sense of local identification might then form a basis for in-group biased environmental perceptions, in which public authorities are seen as a conflicting out-group by local identifiers. This can lead to the emergence of local protests against specific environmental regulations (i.e., Carrus et al., 2014). In sum, the SD paradigm is increasingly being used to address many current environmental problems regarding the management of limited natural resources (i.e., Biel et al., 2008) The results from studies based on this paradigm suggest that strategies for solving collective environmental dilemmas in our societies should stress the common fate between individual group members; in particular they show the crucial importance of communication and shared identities among individuals for the promotion of cooperative and proenvironmental choices.

Place-Specific Environmental Psychology The previous section of this article has focused on environmental psychological processes considered as transverse to the places where people’s every-day experiences occur. However environmental psychology, as already noted, has been characterized, since its beginning, by a place-specific approach to people-environment interactions, and many environmental psychologists concentrate their interest on specific places, ranging from the micro-scale of home interiors, to the meso-scale of workplaces, schools, and hospitals, to the macro-scale of neighborhoods and cities. The three following paragraphs will give an example of this more place-specific environmental psychology, by focusing on three specific places considered as particularly relevant to many people’s daily lives: the workplace, schools, and the city.

Workplaces: Factories, Offices As previously noted, the study of the physical characteristics of workplaces can be traced back to the beginnings of psychological inquiry. The studies by E. Mayo and his coworkers (1933), in the factory of Western Electric Company, on the effects of the physical environment upon workers performance, date back to the first half of the twentieth century. These pioneering studies clearly highlighted how the physical features of the work settings can interact with the interpersonal relations and organizational aspects at work in shaping work performance. Present-day models developed by environmental psychology on environment-behavior relations in

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the workplace still reflect the influence of Mayo’s earlier findings and they also condense the long way experience of psychology on this domain (i.e., Baker, 1981; Sundstrom, 1986; MacCoy, 2002; Walden, 2004b; Veitch, 2012). The model more recently proposed by Gifford (2007) gives a particular emphasis on the different degrees of congruence or incongruence resulting from the interaction between the personal characteristics of workers (e.g., experience, job level, personality, skills, motivation) and the psychical characteristics of the work setting (e.g., noise, temperature, light, spatial density, quality of materials). The higher the congruence, the better the outcomes of the working activities. These can be assessed in terms of workers’ stress or well-being, individual and collective performance, job satisfaction, or organizational commitment. In addition, various psychological processes (e.g., arousal, adaptation, overload, emotions, personal control) may act as mediators of the relationship between the environment-person fit and the outcomes of the working activities. Present trends in the design of workplaces also point to the rapid development of communication technologies as well as to the role of these in matching the augmented concern for environmental sustainability that characterizes present human societies (Veitch, 2012). One example is the possibility for off-site working, or telecommuting, through the use of remote cable connections or wireless systems. This possibility could partly offset the disadvantages of traffic congestions among commuters, but could also bring some wider environmental benefits for reducing urban air pollution and CO2 emissions in urban areas, that affect climate change.

Schools Another place that has also been widely investigated by environmental psychology are schools As with workplaces, the attention devoted to schools is a long-standing tradition in environmental psychology. In fact, the interest of environmental psychology for schools can be traced back to the pioneering studies of Barker et al. in the 1960s. Generally speaking, environmental psychology has clearly outlined how the physical features of schools have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of the educational program. Different physical characteristics of schools can either promote or hamper the education process (Walden, 2004a; Sanoff and Walden, 2012). There is consistent evidence showing that small schools do a better job than large schools. Empirical research has showed how smaller schools are characterized by a better relationship between students and teachers, diminished rates of vandalism and violence, faster career advancement of children with disadvantaged backgrounds, increased participation in and commitment to school activities, and greater satisfaction of parents. Therefore it seems that schools with no more than 500–700 pupils appear to be a more reasonable solution, while schools with more then 2100 students have shown the worst performances. Apart from school size, several other characteristics of the educational physical setting may affect the quality of the education process, as well pointed out by Sanoff and Walden (2012). The most important are the state of maintenance of the school buildings, the presence of design features affording proper privacy regulation, good acoustics in classrooms, the availability of daylight in classrooms, the presence of carpets and decorations and the presence of playgrounds and schoolyards furnished with nature and natural materials. Finally, the design of new schools can benefit also from the involvement of students, teachers, parents, and members of the local communities.

Cities Another important location, that also encompasses the two previously mentioned places, is the city, where presently more than half of the world’s population spends the majority of their lifetime Cities, on one hand, are more and more becoming places in which daily conditions and residential environmental quality are far from optimal for their inhabitants (Uzzell and Moser, 2006; Bonnes et al., 1997). Thus cities are often considered as bad places to live. In line with this trend, environmental psychology has introduced the concept of urban stress to indicate the sources of stress that are typical of urban life, and therefore that affect a large percentage of the population (Moser, 2004) Living in a large-scale urban settlement can frequently become a source of multiple stressors, because of the simultaneous presence of several adverse environmental conditions (Evans and Cohen, 2004). For example, urban settings can amplify the relationships among crowding, social withdrawal, social support, and prosocial behaviors. Moreover, urban life presents several conditions in which people perceive a very low degree of control over events: this often results in diminished self-efficacy and helplessness. On the other hand, despite their bad reputation, cities continue to attract a large part of the human population. Therefore, it is not surprising that urban settlements have been a specific object of analyses for many scholars in environmental psychology, as well illustrated by G. Moser (2012). Some important psychological processes related to the everyday urban experience are actually pointed out by environmental psychology, such as the various place-based processes of place attachment, place appropriation and place identification (Lewika, 2011; Korpela, 2012) In that sense, cities are a primary arena in which almost any environmental psychological theory and empirical finding can be considered. In fact cities can be thought of as a wide field-laboratory for testing all environmental psychological theories. Furthermore, within the sustainable development framework, environmental psychological research on urban settlements shows an increased concern for issues of urban sustainability (Bonnes et al., 2004, 2007). According to this framework that considers, cities as urban ecosystems, cities are seen as having a crucial role by the many intergovernmental agencies concerned with the promotion of environmental sustainability(i.e., Alfsen-Norodom et al., 2004). As a consequence, the concept of sustainable cities has been proposed in order to define the major environmental transformations needed to improve urban systems in order to enhance their ecological’ performance. These issues are at the moment the major challenge for environmental psychology focused on urban issues. For example it was shown that urban-related identity is an important environmental psychological factor that may account for the adoption of sustainable lifestyles among city dwellers; in particular a strong sense of identification with the city can lead urban inhabitants to a stronger and more durable engagement in proenvironmental activities (Uzzell et al., 2002).

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The Future of Environmental Psychology Since its beginnings, environmental psychology has been a frontier field within psychological sciences. On one hand, following the ecological demand coming from several fields of psychology, environmental psychology has tried to underlie the importance of a contextual and transactional approach to psychological inquiry. Within this approach, environmental psychology has focused on an aspect that was typically underestimated by mainstream psychology: the role of physical features of everyday life environments in affecting human psychological processes, behavior and well-being, by also stressing the place-specific nature of these psychological processes. On the other hand, environmental psychology has tried to respond to specific and urgent demands coming from various technical and scientific fields devoted to the design, change, preservation, and management of these everyday environments. In many aspects, environmental psychology is still a frontier field of psychological inquiry, as its primary aims have not substantially changed over the decades. The whole story about the context-related character of human behavior and mental function is still far from being well known; this due not only to the great inter-individual variability, or diversity, at the human level, but also to the wide variability, or diversity, of the physical contextsdor placesdin which human behavior occurs, as noted by Bonnes et al. (2011). At the same time, many of the urgent environmental problems that generated an external demand for the development of environmental psychology have not been solved yet. Several of them have become even more serious, as the quality of the environment and the climatic change (Clayton et al., 2015a); furthermore the availability of life-supporting natural resources have diminished consistently in many parts of the world. Thus, the research agenda of environmental psychology has broadened considerably in the last 30 years, as also recently pointed out by various environmental psychologists, in the American Psychologists: Clayton et al., 2015b. The domain of political ecology with its concept of sustainable development and the support of various related UN Programs, has increasingly influenced all the environmental scientific and technical domains, as very early claimed by F. Di Castri (1984), with his colleagues of UNESCO-MAB Program of Ecological Sciences. On one hand this influence has included the fields of architecture, engineering, and urban planning; the increased relevance of various new architectural and technological domains such as bio-architecture and landscape architecture is an example of such an influence. As a consequence the collaboration between psychologists and architects has increasingly included people-natural environment relations together with peoplebuilt environment relations. On the other hand, in the domain of natural and bio-ecological sciences, an increasing focus has been placed on the human dimension of global environmental and biospheric changes, such in particular climate change, shortage of natural resources (as fresh water, clean air, land, etc.) and loss of biodiversity. Furthermore this biodiversity loss is now increasingly considered not only in biological terms, but also in cultural-human terms: thus as a dangerous loss, in evolutionary terms (thus for any living being including human beings, of diversity in general), as early pointed out by F. Di Castri (2000, 2002). To address these issues, many different psychological theories can be used, coming from a broad range of psychological research domains, such as perception psychology, social and developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral decision theory. The task of environmental psychology is still to combine these existing theories, as well as to develop new ones, for better understanding place-based people-environment relations and for supporting environmental designers, managers and decision makers in enhancing well-being of present and future generations [as often claimed by many authors (Bonnes et al., 2003)]. In veiw of these aims environmental psychology has to further develop also its interdisciplinary working skill, for better integrate its research contributions with the other environmental scientific and technical domains, as also increasingly pointed out: i.e., Bonnes (1984); Bonnes et al. (2003), etc. Overall, present-day environmental psychology can be characterized not only as a highly socially relevant field of social and applied psychology, but also as an opportunity for developing psychology in a more context-related direction, that is, toward that “real world psychology” continuously envisaged in environmental psychology, from its beginnings to the present time: i.e., Proshansky, 1976; Gifford, 2014.

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