Environmental Psychology Essay

ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Environmental psychology is the study of the interface between human behavior and the physical environment (Burrougus, 1989). The term ‘environmental psychology’ was first introduced by William Ittleson on Conference of the American Hospital Association in New York (Cassidy, 1997). For a time it was variously called as psychological ecology, architectural psychology, and ecological psychology because of its integrative nature. One of the definitions proposed defines environmental psychology as the study of ‘interrelationship between individuals and are complementary between the environment and the person’ (Gifford, 1987). In conclusion, environmental psychology is about how we interact with the world we live in, and

On the other hand, Kaplan's term soft fascination benefits from natural environments, which refer to the scene content which automatically captures attention at the same time leaving an opportunity for thinking things over. While hard and soft fascination has no direct correspondent in the cognitive attentional literature, the terms have been related with the ideas of voluntary and involuntary attention (James, 1892 according to Craig and Pearson, 2014). Soft fascination process is seen to lessen the demand on directed attention; thus, allowing greater restoration of exhausted attentional resources compared to the perception of urban environments (Kaplan, 1995, 2001). Another significant factor suggested is that natural environments have the ability to restore directed attention, a common resource that supports both executive functioning performance and self-regulation effectiveness (Baumeister et al., 1998; Norman and Shallice, 2000 according to Kaplan and Berman

However, according to them Ulrich (1983) proposed an essential feature of Attention Restoration Theory wherein it recognizes from more psycho-evolutionary contexts is that the key informational factors such as fascination and being away that help determine restorative settings does not necessarily be associated with natural environments alone. Man-made buildings including monasteries and churches are examples of environments that can also serve as a restorative setting (Ouellette et al., 2005). While Korpela et al. (2001) have claimed that restorative experiences are overly embodied through natural settings, they particularly allow within their definition of “natural” reference to man-made features such as “cottage surrounded by trees next to a lake” (p. 580). Residential and leisure environments (e.g., museums, art galleries) have also been claimed to reduce demands placed on executive attention and thereby promote psychological restoration (Staats, 2012 according to Pearson et al.,