Environmental Psychology: The Field of Environmental Psychology

Environmental Psychology:

The field of environmental psychology is a specialized discipline within psychology whose major developments have been totally adopted into mainstream psychology. In past few decades, the much of the positive and negative visibility of environmental psychology have been lost. One of the significant visibilities to be lost is the initial enthusiasm that came from the common desire by designers and social scientists in developing buildings that would work better for people. In addition to being incorporated into mainstream psychology, environmental psychology has also been adopted into other areas of psychology including social psychology and health psychology. Consequently, environmental education has now become a major area within education and various organizations are increasingly studying human behavior and the physical environment.

The Discipline of Environmental Psychology:

The discipline of environmental psychology can be defined as the study of the relationship between human behavior and the physical environment. Since this discipline seeks to explain the interaction between individuals and the environment in various ways, it focuses on analyzing the person-environment system itself, as a holistic area of evaluation. The history of environmental psychology can be traced back to 1890s and 1900s when Kurt Lewin and Roger Barker examined the environment. While the physical environment was not their main focus, they challenged the tradition psychological research of examining human behavior in isolation from the environment. The works of these researchers formed the bedrock for the analysis of human interactions and the physical environment that has been explained in various ways. Since then, environmental psychology has become an important are in the link between global environmental issues and psychology (Evans, n.d.).

Theoretical Approaches to Environmental Psychology:

The discipline or field of environmental psychology has mainly been developed on early and ongoing theoretical approaches including motivational theories. Some of the major theoretical approaches to environmental psychology include the Ecological Perception Theory and Attention Restoration Theory. The ecological perception theory is based on the fact that the most essential way with which human beings respond to the environment is through perceiving its properties. The ecological approach to environmental psychology stresses on how perception originates from action in the world instead of regarding perception in passive or information processing terms. The Attention Restoration Theory is an approach used to explain the positive effects of natural environments on humans through various direct and immediate ways of exposure. The theory is an interactionist approach since it's based on the assumptions about intrinsic attention capacity and the environmental qualities relating to this capacity.

These theoretical approaches to environmental psychology have both similarities and differences in their explanations of this discipline. The major similarity between the approaches is regarding their explanations on the significance of mental effort in human relationship with the environment. The ecological perception theoretical approach is based on the concept of affordances, which is the perceived functional importance of an event, item, or place to an individual. The concept is associated with the theory through the importance of mental effort or cognitive processes in an individual's experience of the world or the environment. Similarly, the Attention Restoration Theory states that daily human interactions with the environment require mental effort or processes to direct these interactions (Clayton & Myers, 2009, p. 85).

While the two approaches have few similarities, there are several differences between them including the fact that Attention Restoration Theory states that a person's cognitive resources can be exhausted and restored in the suitable or restorative environments. In contrast, the ecological perception approach states that cognitive processes do not exclusively mediate human experience of the environment though it's integrated with objective physical reality. The restoration theoretical approach argues that reflection and improved self-knowledge are provided by natural environments. The main focus of the ecological approach is on the perceptual awareness that permits a person to scrutinize an environment further since perception and cognition are the basis of action in the world.

Importance of Research in Environmental Psychology:

The field of environmental psychology consists of various research methods that are available to environmental psychology researchers and classified into three main categories i.e. field experimentation, field correlational analysis, and laboratory experimentation. Through the use of various population samples, research in this field has taken place more frequently in practical settings and the field instead of laboratory settings (Stewart, 2007, p. 69). Researchers use adjustment paradigm, opportunity structures paradigm, and socio-cultural paradigm.