The Physical Environment and Behavior: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to the Literature

471 Pages·1981·10.57 MB·English

by  Joachim F. Wohlwill

The Physical
Environment
and Behavior
AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
AND GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE
The Physical
Environment
and Behavior
AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
AND GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE
Joachim E Wohlwill
and
Gerald D. Weisman
The Penngylvania State University
University Park, Penngylvania
PLENUM PRESS· NEW YORK AND LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wohlwill, Joachim F.
The physical environment and behavior.
Includes index.
1. Environmental psychology - Bibliography. I. Weisman, Gerald D. II. Title.
Z7204.E55W63 [BF353] 016.3042 81-4840
ISBN-13: 978-1-4615-9229-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4615-9227-3 AACR2
DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4615-9227-3
© 1981 Plenum Press, New York
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981
A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation
233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The preparation of an extensive bibliography such as this
volume inevitably involves the collaborative efforts of a
considerable number of persons working in a variety of
capacities. Among these, we wish to acknowledge in
particular the assistance of the following individuals:
Don Hazle, who set up the program for the computer-based
typescript and gave freely of his time and advice in the
preparation of the ms. as it went through its successive
stages.
Norma Eckenroth and Arlene Lear, who worked diligently
and expertly on the typing of the ms., shepherded it through
its several revisions, and produced the final text.
Jean Shorett, who participated in the early phases of the
planning of this bibliography, and contributed annotations
for Chapter 5.
Diane Jimski and Nitza Vega who provided bibliographic
assistance in the compilation of the material for Chapters
10 through 13.
Suzy Weisman, who did the painstaking work of copy
edit ing the ms.
Terry Ramanujam,who assisted in the final editing of the
Ms. and prepared the index.
To all of these persons -- and any others whom we may
inadvertently have omitted -- our sincere thanks. Last, but
not least, we owe a particular debt of gratitude to the
Program in Man-Environment Relations at the Pennsylvania
State University for its support, moral and material, of
this project.
J. F. W.
September, 1980
G. D. W.
v
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION • 1
P ART I: GENERAL MATERIALS
1. GENERAL REFERENCE AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES. 9
a. Bibliographies, Literature Reviews,
and Reference Books • • • • • • 9
b. Texts, Readers and Major Monographs 11
c. Conference Proceedings •••••.. 22
2. HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL
WORKS ••.•....• . . • . . • • . • 29
a. History, Theory and Selective Reviews 29
b. Methodology • . • • • • . • • • • • • 38
PART II: PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN THE
INDIVIDUAL'S RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT
3. ENVIRONMENTAL COMPREHENSION AND EVALUATION 47
a. Environmental Perception ...•• 48
b. Environmental Cognition ••••.. 53
c. Environmental Meaning: Subjective
Dimensions of Environmental Stimuli 77
d. Environmental Aesthetics: Affective,
Evaluative and Preferential Responses
to Environments • • • • • . . . 82
4. ENVIRONMENTAL STIMULATION AND STRESS • 93
a. Environmental Stimulation 94
b. Environmental Stress •••••• 98
c. Specific Environmental Dimensions and
Sources of Stress • • • • 103
d. Noise 107
e. Isolation and Extreme or Unusual
Environments • • • . • • 119
vii
viii CONTENTS
5. SOCIO-SPATIAL PROCESSES 127
a. General Works 128
b. Crowding. . . 130
c. Privacy 152
d. Territoriality and Personalization
of Territory . 157
e. Personal Space 164
6. BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY 177
PART III: APPLIED AREAS AND SPECIAL ISSUES
7. THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR . . 191
a. Gardens, Parks, Playgrounds and General
Response to Greenery and Vegetation 192
b. Perception and Assessment of Landscape
and Scenery . . . . • . . . . . 195
c. Outdoor Recreation Behavior in Natural
Settings .... 208
d. Natural Hazards 230
8. ATTITUDINAL AND BEHAVIORAL ASPECTS OF
ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS . . • . . • 237
a. Environmental Attitudes 238
b. The Role of Behavior, and Behavior Change,
in Environmental Problems .. . . 257
9. BEHAVIORAL ASPECTS OF TRANSPORTATION, TRAVEL
AND TRAFFIC 265
10. INSTITUTIONAL SETTINGS 279
a. Educational Environments 281
b. Medical Care and Mental .H ealth
. . . . .
Environments .. 298
c. Correctional Environments 313
11. THE HOUSING ENVIRONMENT 323
a. Housing Effects 324
b. Student Housing 344
c. Housing for the Elderly 350
d. Residential Satisfaction 357
12. THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT 369
a. The Urban Environment 370
b. Behavior in Urban Spaces 381
c. The Neighborhood and Social Relationships 388
d. Urban Perception and Cognition . . . . .• 394
CONTENTS
ix
13. INTERIOR ENVIRONMENTS 403
a. Office Environments 404
b. Other Interior Settings 412
PART IV: COGNATE AREAS
14. BEHAVIORAL DEMOGRAPHY 423
15. THE ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL SCIENCES 433
a. General Environmental Social Science 433
h. Anthropology. • • . . . 436
c. Behavioral Geography .... 437
d. Environmental Sociology 439
e. Environmental Political Science 441
f. Environmental Economics 442
16. SPECIAL AREAS OF APPLICATION 445
a. Environmental Design .. 445
b. Social Impact Assessment 450
AUTHOR INDEX 455
INTRODUCTION
The field of "Environment-and-Behavior"
This bibliography is aimed at the researcher and advanced
student working in the field of environmental psychology, as
it has come to be designated over the past decade. A more
appropriate term might be "environment-behavior studies," to
suggest the important characteristic of this field as one
that transcends the province of the psychologist, and brings
together workers, as well as problems, methods, and concepts
from a great diversity of disciplines and professional
fields. Among these we may include geography and sociology,
architecture, landscape architecture and planning, forestry,
natural resource management and leisure and recreation
research -- to name only the most important of the diverse
fields from which material for this bibliography has been
drawn.
This is in fact one of the primary reasons for our belief
in the value of such a volume. The literature in the
environment-behavior field is scattered through the most
diverse sources, including not only the major periodical and
monographic literature in each of the above-mentioned
disciplines and professions (and others as well), but also a
variety of more specialized publications of varying degrees
of accessibility. Thus it seemed to us helpful to the
researcher, teacher and student in this area to bring this
far-flung literature together in a single volume, that might
be used as a guide to the field. We aimed at a
comprehensive treatment, including both basic and applied
aspects, and relations of behavior both to the man-made or
artificial and to the natural environment.
A brief overview of the field as we see it may be
helpful, to indicate our perspective on it. Environmental
psychology as a subspecialty of psychology proper came into
being in the late sixties. This occurred in part at the
instigation of architects and planners, seeking the aid of
the behavioral scientist for guidance in the design of
2 INTRODUCTION
buildings, (particularly those housing social institutions),
so as to enhance the satisfaction and well-being of their
users. Psychologists generally came into the field with
less of an applied, problem-solving orientation, and
approached it rather in terms of an interest in certain
theoretical and empirical issues. Thus, social
psychologists became "environmental" in terms of a focus on
spatial aspects of interpersonal behavior, while perceptual
and cognitive psychologists became interested in peopleos
perception of different features of the large-scale
environment, and in their mental representation of it.
Interest in this latter problem came likewise from the side
of geographers, as well as from a number of theoretically
inclined architects and planners. Still other psychologists
saw in the field an opportunity to study the affective and
motivational response of the individual to stimulation, as
well as processes of adaptation and coping to conditions of
environmental stress, or to develop conceptions of attitude
and personality based on a concept of "environmental
dispositions." Finally, advocates of certain idiosyncratic
theoretical views and approaches to the study of behavior
found in environmental psychology a new realm for the
application and extension of their ideas. Foremost among
these are the behavioral ecologists, whose ecological
perspective and emphasis on the role of· behavior settings as
primary determinants of behavior made them inherently
sympathetic to an environmental focus. In a rather
different vein we find the proponents of behavior
modification becoming involved in the domain of
environmental problems deriving from or aggravated by
individual behavior, thus providing them with a new testing
ground for their concepts and methodologies;
This is necessarily a brief and most incomplete picture
of the diverse directions from which psychologists have
entered this field. The diversity is hardly surprising,
once we recognize that environmental factors cut across all
of our common categories of behavior, and relate to
behavioral problems at all levels, from the perceptual to
the motivational, from the cognitive to the interpersonal.
This very diversity may, ironically, have impeded the wider
acceptance of environmental psychology as a valid specialty
within the discipline of psychology -- in a very real sense
all psychology is "environmental," that is, interested in
the role of environmental forces in behavior. Nevertheless,
INTRODUCTION 3
environmental psychologists, and courses and texts devoted
to the field, have clearly established themselves on the
psychological scene, and so a bibliographic reference work
devoted to their diversified concerns should prove of value.
But, as already indicated, the environment-and-behavior
field is the province of workers representing many
disciplinary and professional concerns, in addition to
psychology. Thus researchers from such applied specialties
as landscape architecture, as well as forestry and natural
recreation have become involved in studies of the dimensions
of evaluative response to the environment and of preference
or choice of particular locales for recreation and other
forms of behavior; those in the field of transportation have
been interested in determinants of transportation-mode
choice, and of response to alternative transportation forms.
Similarly, architects and designers have studied such
questions as determinants of residential satisfaction, and
evaluation of buildings and facilities by their users. We
have tried, through the coverage provided by this volume, to
reflect this multifaced character of the field, by including
sections dealing with various applied concerns that have
sprung up over the past decade and which occupy an integral
place in the domain of environment-behavior studies,
alongside those of the environmental psychologists
identified primarily with the discipline of psychology.
Organization, content and format of the volume
The overall organization of the volume reflects the dual
character of the field alluded to above; of its four major
sections, the two principal ones are devoted to work on
basic psychological processes on the one hand, and to work
on applied problems on the other. Within one or the other
of these will be found the major categories of research that
have evolved in the environment-and-behavior field. It is
apparent that any division into basic vs. applied is far
from clear-cut, and there are numerous instances in which we
found ourselves in doubt as to which section a particular
study should be included in. In general we have handled
such issues of overlap through cross-referencing from one
section to another, by listing, at the end of each, a set of
item numbers referring to works that we considered relevant
to the subject-matter of that section, but which are
assigned to other chapters of the volume (or to other
sections of the same chapter).