Environmental psychology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field focused on the interplay between humans and their surroundings. The field defines the term environment broadly encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. When solving problems involving human-environment interactions, whether global or local, one must have a model of human nature that predicts the environmental conditions under which humans will behave in a decent and creative manner. With such a model one can design, manage, protect and/or restore environments that enhance reasonable behavior, predict what the likely outcome will be when these conditions are not met, and diagnose problem situations. The field develops such a model of human nature while retaining a broad and inherently multidisciplinary focus. It explores such dissimilar issues as common property resource management, wayfinding in complex settings, the effect of environmental stress on human performance, the characteristics of restorative environments, human information processing, and the promotion of durable conservation behavior. Although "environmental psychology" is arguably the best-known and most comprehensive description of the field, it is also known as human factors science, cognitive ergonomics, environmental social sciences, architectural psychology, socio-architecture, ecological psychology, ecopsychology, behavioral geography, environment-behavior studies, person-environment studies, environmental sociology, social ecology, and environmental design research.
See also
- Aesthetics
- Architecture
- Behavioural sciences
- Biophilia hypothesis
- Children, Youth and Environments (journal)
- Climatotherapy
- Connectedness to nature scale
- Conservation psychology
- Disciplinary architecture
- Deep ecology
- Ecopsychology
- Environmental dependence syndrome
- Environmental design
- Environmental design and planning
- Ergonomics
- Evolutionary psychology
- Feng shui
- Healing environments
- Human factors
- Interior design psychology
- Journal of Environmental Psychology
- Neighborhood watch
- Nidotherapy
- Psychology
- Situational strength
- Social sciences
- Urban design