Category: Mental Health

What is Dignity of Risk?

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Introduction

Dignity of risk is the idea that self-determination and the right to take reasonable risks are essential for dignity and self esteem and so should not be impeded by excessively-cautious caregivers, concerned about their duty of care.

The concept is applicable to adults who are under care such as elderly people, people living with disability, and people with mental health problems. It has also been applied to children, including those living with disabilities.

Refer to Agency (Sociology) and Agency (Psychology).

Brief History

Ideas that would later develop into the concept of dignity of risk arose during the late 1960s in Sweden. Dr. Bengt Nirje formed a group for people both with and without intellectual disabilities. The group would meet to plan an outing, go on the outing, and meet afterwards to discuss how the meeting went. This allowed people with intellectual disabilities to have some ‘normal experiences’ in the community, and members without intellectual disabilities were told that the participants with disabilities should make their own decisions without interference, even if mistakes were made. Dr. Nirje once said, “to be allowed to be human means to be allowed to fail.” This group would go on to inspire self advocacy groups around the world.

The concept was first articulated in a 1972 article The dignity of risk and the mentally retarded by Robert Perske:

Overprotection may appear on the surface to be kind, but it can be really evil. An oversupply can smother people emotionally, squeeze the life out of their hopes and expectations, and strip them of their dignity. Overprotection can keep people from becoming all they could become. Many of our best achievements came the hard way: We took risks, fell flat, suffered, picked ourselves up, and tried again. Sometimes we made it and sometimes we did not. Even so, we were given the chance to try. Persons with special needs need these chances, too. Of course, we are talking about prudent risks. People should not be expected to blindly face challenges that, without a doubt, will explode in their faces. Knowing which chances are prudent and which are not – this is a new skill that needs to be acquired. On the other hand, a risk is really only when it is not known beforehand whether a person can succeed. The real world is not always safe, secure, and predictable, it does not always say “please,” “excuse me”, or “I’m sorry”. Every day we face the possibility of being thrown into situations where we will have to risk everything … In the past, we found clever ways to build avoidance of risk into the lives of persons living with disabilities. Now we must work equally hard to help find the proper amount of risk these people have the right to take. We have learned that there can be healthy development in risk taking and there can be crippling indignity in safety!

In 1980, the concept was relied upon by Julian Wolpert, Professor of Geography, Public Affairs, and Urban Planning at Princeton University, to support his argument in a paper, “The Dignity of Risk”, which has since been described as “seminal”. Wolpert’s argument was that a paternalistic approach to people living with disability, prioritising safeguarding over the rights of individuals to independent decision-making, is a limitation on personal freedom.

Conflict with Duty of Care

Allowing people under care to take risks is often perceived to be in conflict with the caregivers’ duty of care. Finding a balance between these competing considerations can be difficult when formulating policies and guidelines for caregiving.

Problems of Overprotection

Protection is often used to justify violating the rights of people with disabilities. To deny someone the opportunity to make mistakes is to violate the right to make decisions about their own lives. Many self-advocates see the dignity of risk as a human right. Max Barrows, a self-advocate from Vermont, says “Life is about learning from the mistakes that you make I appreciate and we appreciate protection from people, but please don’t protect us too much or at all from living our lives.” Protection has been used to justify institutionalisation, sheltered workshops and other segregated settings. Many institutions were and are sites of abuse, neglect and sexual assault. Many people with disabilities are also placed under guardianship, which is when someone else makes decisions about their life, including where they live, how they spend their money, and the health care they receive. This is done to stop people from making “bad choices.” Many disability advocates argue for the replacement of guardianship with supported decision making, where people with disabilities make their own decisions with support and accommodations.

Overprotection of people with disabilities causes low self-esteem and underachievement because of lowered expectations that come with overprotection. Internalisation of low expectations causes the person with a disability to believe that they are less capable than others in similar situations.

In elderly people, overprotection can result in learned dependency and a decreased ability for self-care:

“It is possible to deliver physical care that has positive outcomes and returns a person to full function, yet, if during that care they have not been involved, allowed to make choices and respectfully assisted with activities of daily living, it may be possible to cause psychological damage through undermining that person’s dignity.”

Disability Rights Movement

The right to fail and the dignity of risk are basic tenets of multiple movements, including the independent living movement and the self advocacy movement.

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The first of eight “guiding principles” of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states: “Respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy including the freedom to make one’s own choices, and independence of persons.”

Article 12 of the Convention states that states:

“shall recognize that persons with disabilities enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life” and that “shall take all appropriate and effective measures to ensure the equal right of persons with disabilities to own or inherit property, to control their own financial affairs and to have equal access to bank loans, mortgages and other forms of financial credit, and shall ensure that persons with disabilities are not arbitrarily deprived of their property.”

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignity_of_risk >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

A Brief Overview of Agency (Psychology)

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

The first half of the topic of agency deals with the behavioural sense, or outward expressive evidence thereof.

In behavioural psychology, agents are goal-directed entities that are able to monitor their environment to select and perform efficient means-ends actions that are available in a given situation to achieve an intended goal. Behavioural agency, therefore, implies the ability to perceive and to change the environment of the agent. Crucially, it also entails intentionality to represent the goal-state in the future, equifinal variability to be able to achieve the intended goal-state with different actions in different contexts, and rationality of actions in relation to their goal to produce the most efficient action available. Cognitive scientists and Behavioural psychologists have thoroughly investigated agency attribution in humans and non-human animals, since social cognitive mechanisms such as communication, social learning, imitation, or theory of mind presuppose the ability to identify agents and differentiate them from inanimate, non-agentive objects. This ability has also been assumed to have a major effect on inferential and predictive processes of the observers of agents, because agentive entities are expected to perform autonomous behaviour based on their current and previous knowledge and intentions. On the other hand, inanimate objects are supposed to react to external physical forces.

Although the concepts are often confused with one another, sensitivity to agency and the sense of agency are distinct and separate concepts. The sensitivity to agency can be explained as a cognitive ability to identify agentive entities in the environment, while the sense of agency refers to the exertion of control over the environment and sometimes to self-efficacy, which is an individual’s learned belief of how able they are to succeed in specific situations.

The other half of the topic of agency deals with the arguments of determinism typically found in theories of personality and developmental lifespan. Different from philosophical determinism, this determinism encapsulates forms of deterministic principles found within these psychological theories, such as hedonism, developmental stage theory, the law of non-contradiction, consistency, necessity, and others. Capitalising on the first half of agency, these principles of determinism are founded on the test-retest/empirical evidences of observable behaviour. Founding actors of Psychology (such as Sigmund Freud, and B.F. Skinner) defaulted on deterministic principles in order to form their theories. Much of this is due to the scientific consensus of the era, particularly concerning Newtonian principles of linear time and the attempts made by earlier psychologists to have psychology recognised as a serious science.

Refer to Agency (Sociology) and Dignity of Risk.

Theoretical Approaches of Agency

Carey and Spelke’s model of domain-specific cognition explained certain perceptual and representational abilities vital to how humans recognise other humans. They attempted to answer the question of how humans understand “the notion that people are sentient beings who choose their actions”. They identified that even infants appear to be born with the ability to recognise human facial features but noted that there is a body of research that has decently refuted the idea that babies use facial representations “to identify people as entities expected to be capable of perceptions and purposive action”. Instead, Carey and Spelke suggested that humans identify other sentient beings through observation of the actions those beings perform instead of identifying them by their appearances.

According to Carey and Spelke, the cognitive models explaining specific perceptual and representational abilities, for instance the models of agency recognition, can be separated into two different classes:

  • Feature-based models; and
  • Principle-based approaches.

The feature-based models of agency assume that the perception of an observer focuses on featural and behavioural cues that help to identify agents. Previous studies show that even very young human observers are sensitive to

  • Self-propulsion;
  • Non-rigid transformation of the object’s surface;
  • Irregular path movement;
  • causation at a distance; and
  • Contingent turn-taking reactivity.

However, none of these cues alone are necessary or sufficient to identify an agent, since unfamiliar, novel entities like animated figures or robots without human features can elicit agency attribution in humans. Therefore, cognitive models belonging to the principle-based approaches were designed to describe how humans perceive agency assuming that the detection of agency is not a precondition, but a consequence of inferential processes about potentially agentive objects.

The theory of teleological stance proposes that from 12 months of age humans can apply the principle of rational action to determine whether the observed entity is an agent or an inanimate object depending on an agent’s rational behaviour for its own functioning. The theory assumes that the rationality principle makes observers able to relate the action, the represented goal-state and the current situational constraints to decide whether an object is an agent. For instance, if infants had learned that an abstract, unfamiliar agent (an animated circle on a display) approaches another entity by jumping over an obstacle, when the obstacle had been removed, they expected a new, but highly rational behaviour from the agent to approach the other entity via a straight pathway. In contrast, when infants were shown that the unfamiliar entity always made a detour when approaching its goal-object exhibiting non-justifiable behaviour of jumping in the absence of an obstacle, they did not expect rational behaviour when the situational constraints changed.

These results and later empirical studies underpinned that agency recognition in humans can be explained by principle-based models rather than simple perceptual cues. As Gergely and Csibra concluded from 12-month of age humans “can take the teleological stance to interpret actions as means to goals, can evaluate the relative efficiency of means by applying the principle of rational action, and can generate systematic inferences to identify relevant aspects of the situation to justify the action as an efficient means even when these aspects are not directly visible to them”.

Types of Agents

It was proposed that the representation of agency can be based on the sensitivity to different abilities observed in agentive entities probably in humans and perhaps in non-human species as well. In humans, the species-specific social environment allows one to identify agents either based on their intentional behaviour, on their non-communicative, rational, goal-directed actions or by recognising their communicative abilities. Agents identified by their intentional behaviours and goal-directed actions are considered instrumental agents, while agents identified by an action’s communicative properties are considered communicative agents. In non-human species, however, besides these types of input information, unfamiliar potential agents can be identified on the basis of their perceptual abilities. These have context-dependent effects on the behaviour of the non-human observer even in the absence of a visible goal-object that may be required to assess the effectiveness of their goal-approach.

Instrumental Agency

According to Gergely, instrumental agents are intentional agents that exhibit actions in order to realise their goal states in the environment. The recognition of instrumental agents has been investigated by numerous experiments in human infants, and also in non-human apes. These studies reveal that when an agent exhibits an instrumental action it is expected by human infants to achieve its goal in an efficient manner, which is rational in terms of efforts in a given context.

On the other hand, it is also expected by infants that an agent should have a clear goal-state to be achieved. Gergely said, “Before the end of their first year, infants can track others’ subjective motivations.” This suggests that infants understand that humans and other potential agents act in order to achieve some goal whether the goal is seen or unseen. Gergely went on to postulate that infants judge potentially instrumental actions based on how efficiently that action seems to help propel the potential agent towards forward progress in the goal.

In practice, instrumental agency seems to fluctuate with various conditions, or at least the ability to exercise instrumental agency does. One of these conditions appear to be political/social, indicating that lower access to food or undernutrition has a bidirectional influence on women’s agency in East African countries.

Communicative Agency

In contrast to instrumental agents, communicative agents are intentional agents whose actions are performed to bring about a specific change in the mental representations of the addressee, for instance by providing new and relevant information. The recognition of communicative agency may allow for the observer to predict that communicative information transfer can have a relevant effect on the behaviour of the agent, even if the interacting agents and their communicative signals are unfamiliar. Because all communicative agents are, definitionally, intentional agents as well, communicative agents are assumed to be a subset of intentional agents; however, it is not necessary that all intentional agents possess communicative capabilities. Really, the idea here is that one’s intentionality is what a communicative agent would be communicating to others, thus signifying that the agent is performing actions that act in some ways as a means to an end.

Catt connected communication and intentionality in this way, “Communication is that possibility of experiencing consciousness in which phenomenological intentionality is simultaneously realised and actualised. The abductive result is agency, the distinctive human capacity to illuminate meaning in the embodiment of semiosis.” By this one can understand that in many ways an agent’s ability to communicate is fundamental to their agentive nature, and intentionality is a key component of what a communicative agent communicates. Additionally, an intentional agent’s intentions are at least partially achieved through communication.

Communicative agency is also viewed as the rationale behind social and relational communications and shared activities. It is considered “fundamentally interpretive and relational.” Games, especially games with a narrative nature, play with one’s definitions and conceptions of communicative agency and strengthens one’s communicative abilities and relationships. Spracklen and Spracklen investigated social bonding over “dark leisure”, including goth musical culture, and they reasoned that creating bonds with others over dark culture is a method of commiserating over shared struggles. Additionally, they argued that dark culture of such a nature is a means to reducing cognitive dissonance between the ideals of what society could be and the state of society in reality.

Navigational Agency

The construal of navigational agency is based on the assumption that Leslie’s theory on agency implies two different types of distal sensitivity; distal sensitivity in space and distal sensitivity in time. While goal-directed instrumental agents need both of these abilities to represent a goal-state in the future and achieve it in a rational and efficient manner, navigational agents are supposed to have only perceptual abilities, that is a distal sensitivity in space to avoid collision with objects in their environments. A study contrasting the ability of dogs and human infants to attribute agency to unfamiliar self-propelled object showed that dogs – unlike human infants – may lack the capability to recognise instrumental agents, however they can identify navigational agents.

Agency Recognition in Non-Human Animals

The ability to represent the efficiency of goal-directed actions of an instrumental agent may be a phylogenetically ancient core cognitive mechanism that can be found in non-human primates as well. Previous research provided evidence for this assumption showing that this sensitivity affects the expectations of cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques, and chimpanzees. Non-human apes are able to make inferences about the goal of an instrumental agent by taking the environmental constraints that can guide the agents’ actions into account. Moreover, it seems that non-human species like dogs can recognise contingent reactivity as an abstract of cue of agency, and respond to contingent agent significantly different in contrast to inanimate objects.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(psychology) >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

A Brief Overview of Agency (Sociology)

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfil their potential. For instance, structure consists of those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit agents and their decisions. The influences from structure and agency are debated—it is unclear to what extent a person’s actions are constrained by social systems.

One’s agency is one’s independent capability or ability to act on one’s will. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one’s experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position one is born into. Disagreement on the extent of one’s agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. parents and children.

Refer to Agency (Psychology) and Dignity of Risk.

Brief History

The overall concept of agency has existed since the Enlightenment where there was debate over whether human freedom was expressed through instrumental rationality or moral and norm-based action. John Locke argued in favour of freedom being based on self-interest. His rejection of the binding on tradition and the concept of the social contract led to the conception of agency as the capacity of human beings to shape the circumstances in which they live. Jean-Jacques Rousseau explored an alternative conception of this freedom by framing it as a moral will. There was a bifurcation between the rational-utilitarian and non-rational-normative dimensions of action that Immanuel Kant addressed. Kant saw freedom as normative grounded individual will, governed by the categorical imperative. These ideas were the point of departure for concerns regarding non-rational, norm-oriented action in classical sociological theory contrasting with the views on the rational instrumental action.

These definitions of agency remained mostly unquestioned until the nineteenth century, when philosophers began arguing that the choices humans make are dictated by forces beyond their control. For example, Karl Marx argued that in modern society, people were controlled by the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that man made choices based on his own selfish desires, or the “will to power” and, famously, Paul Ricœur added Freud – as a third member of the “school of suspicion” – who accounted for the unconscious determinants of human behaviour. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s talk of rule-following and private language arguments in his Philosophical Investigations has also made its way into the discussion of agency, in the work of Charles Taylor for example.

Definitions and Processes

Agency has also been defined in the American Journal of Sociology as a temporally embedded process that encompasses three different constitutive elements: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation. Each of these elements is a component of agency as a whole. They are used to study different aspects of agency independently to make conclusions about the bigger concept. The iteration element of agency refers to the selective reactivation of past patterns of thought and action. In this way, actors have routine actions in response to typical situations that help them sustain identities, interactions and institutions over time. The projective element encompasses the process of imagining possible future trajectories of action connected to the actor’s hopes, fears, and desires for the future. The last element, the practical-evaluative element, entails the capacity of people to make practical and normative judgements amongst alternative possible actions in response to a context, a demand or a presently evolving situation.

Hewson’s Classification

Martin Hewson, Associate at the York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, describes three types of agency: individual, proxy, and collective. Individual agency is when a person acts on their own behalf, whereas proxy agency is when an individual acts on behalf of someone else (such as an employer). Collective agency occurs when people act together, such as a social movement. Hewson also identifies three properties of human beings that give rise to agency: intentionality, power, and rationality. Human beings act with intention and are goal oriented. They also have differing amounts of abilities and resources resulting in some having greater agency (power) than others. Finally, human beings use their intellect to guide their actions and predict the consequences of their actions.

In Conversation

In his work on conversational agency, David R. Gibson defines agency as action that furthers an actor’s idiosyncratic objectives in the face of localised constraints that also have the potential of suppressing the very same action. Constraints such as who is speaking, how is participation shifted among participants, and topical and relevance constraints can impact the possibility of expressing agency. Seizing the moment when the “looseness” of such constraints allows, enables users to express what Gibson calls “colloquial agency”.

Feelings

Social psychologist Daniel Wegner discusses how an “illusion of control” may cause people to take credit for events that they did not cause. These false judgments of agency occur especially under stress, or when the results of the event were ones that the individual desired (also see self-serving biases). Janet Metcalfe and her colleagues have identified other possible heuristics, or rules of thumb that people use to make judgments of agency. These include a “forward model” in which the mind actually compares two signals to judge agency: the feedback from a movement, but also an “efferent copy” – a mental prediction of what that movement feedback should feel like. Top down processing (understanding of a situation, and other possible explanations) can also influence judgments of agency. Furthermore, the relative importance of one heuristic over another seems to change with age.

From an evolutionary perspective, the illusion of agency would be beneficial in allowing social animals to ultimately predict the actions of others. If one considers themself a conscious agent, then the quality of agency would naturally be intuited upon others. As it is possible to deduce another’s intentions, the assumption of agency allows one to extrapolate from those intentions what actions someone else is likely to perform.

Under other conditions, cooperation between two subjects with a mutual feeling of control is what James M. Dow, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hendrix College, defines as “joint agency.” According to various studies on optimistic views of cooperation, “the awareness of doing things together jointly suggest that the experience of subjects engaging in cooperation involves a positive here and now experience of the activity being under joint control.” Shared agency increases the amount of control between those cooperating in any given situation, which, in return, could have negative effects on individuals that the partners in control associate with. If joint agency is held by two people that are already in a position of power, the partners’ heightened feeling of agency directly affects those who are inferior to them. The inferiors’ sense of agency will most likely decrease upon the superiors’ joint control because of intimidation and solitude factors. Although working together towards a common goal tends to cause an increased feeling of agency, the inflation of control could have many unforeseen consequences.

Children

Children’s sense of agency is often not taken into account because of the common belief that they are not capable of making their own rational decisions without adult guidance.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology) >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Interior Design Psychology

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Interior design psychology is a field within environmental psychology, which concerns the environmental conditions of the interior.

It is a direct study of the relationship between an environment and how that environment affects the behaviour of its inhabitants, intending to maximise the positive effects of this relationship. Through interior design psychology, the performance and efficiency of the space and the well-being of the individual are improved. Figures like Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, John B. Calhoun and Jean Baudrillard have shown that by incorporating this psychology into design one can control an environment and to an extent, the relationship and behaviour of its inhabitants. An example of this is seen through the rat experiments conducted by Calhoun in which he noted the aggression, killing and changed sexual tendencies amongst rats. This experiment created a stark behavioural analogy between the rat’s behaviour and inhabitation in high-rise building projects in the US after WWII, an example of which is the Pruitt-Igoe development in St Louis demolished in 1972 only 21 years after being erected.

Proxemics

Proxemics study the amount of space people feel necessary to have between themselves and others.

Brief Background

A greater awareness into this field has emerged since the 20th century when the function and performance of the interior became of chief importance in designing habitations, the start of user-centred design, for example, La Maison de Verre. This modern idea of the interior-designing for the user from the inside to the outside has coincided with psychological analysis on the effects on inhabitations.

In The Emergence of the Interior, Charles Rice rationalised the implications of the interior:

  • Under the context of modernity;
  • Status of the experience;
  • Presence of history; and
  • Knowledge about subjectivity.

The Importance of the development of this field is evident through the above areas of study

Understanding and implementation of interior design psychology can impact and improve the performance, efficiency and well-being of the individual inhabitant. As illustrated through the above categories this is an important and relevant developing field within design and planning.

Crowding and Personal Space

In this field of study, the phenomenon of territoriality is demonstrated continuously through unwritten indices and behaviours, which communicate, the conscious or subconscious notions of personal space and territoriality. This phenomenon is seen, for example, through the use of public seating and the empty seats on a crowded bus or train. “Crowding occurs when the regulation of social interaction is unsuccessful and our desires for social interaction are exceeded by the actual amount of social interaction experienced.” Studies observing social behaviours and psychology have indicated, such as in the case of commuters that people will seek to maximize personal space whether standing or sitting.

In a study conducted by Gary W. Evans and Richard E. Wene, (who work within the field of environmental design and human development) of 139 adult commuters, commuting between New Jersey and Manhattan, (54% male) saliva samples were taken to measure cortisol levels, a hormonal marker of stress. Their research accounts statistically for other possible stressors such as income and general life stress. “We find that a more proximal index of density is correlated with multiple indices of stress wherein a more distal index of density is not.” Concerns arising from the results of this study suggest that small deviations in increased seat density, controlled against income stress, would elevate the log of cortisol (i.e. stress levels) and diminish task performance and mood.

Smooth and Striated Space

According to Learning Spaces: Creating Opportunities for Knowledge Creation in Academic Life by Savin-Baden, it explored the concept of space in the physical sense when describing smooth and striated cultural spaces. Smooth spaces are described as “nomadic”; that is, in a constant state of movement. For example, the lobby of a hotel, an activity room where the seating directions are towards each other instead of focusing in one line, which provides a sense of relaxation and informality. These spaces are open, flexible, and owned by their inhabitants. Smooth spaces are where knowledge is contested and learning is co-created. They are messy and undisciplined, which often creates tension between stakeholders and users. Striated spaces, on the other hand, are described as bounded spaces, which refers to a certain orientation that focuses primarily in one direction, reflecting the organisational and pedagogical structure of the space. Classrooms and lecture halls are examples of striated spaces.

Relationships between People

Closely related to the proxemics of space, in the area of privacy. In “Perspectives on Privacy” P. Brierley Newell from the department of psychology at the University of Warwick, Coventry defines privacy as “a voluntary and temporary condition of separation from the public domain.” The desire for privacy is often identified as a link between stress and distress. The ability to obtain privacy within an environment allows the individual to separate themselves physically and mentally from others and relax. This notion is of key importance in determining the behaviour and well-being of the individual. As above in the scenario of crowding and density on public transport, privacy dictates the perception of comfort, in relation to crowding and personal space. Dissatisfaction with one’s environment can be related to close proximity with others, leading to stress and as a result, diminish mood and performance behaviours.

Defensible Space

This theory began development in 1962 when John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments on rats to study population density and social pathology. From these experiments, a breeding utopia was established for the rats in which they only lacked space. “Unwanted social contact occurred with increasing frequency, leading to increased stress and aggression. Following the work of the physiologist, Hans Selye, it seemed that the adrenal system offered the standard binary solution: fight or flight. But in the sealed enclosure, the flight was impossible. Violence quickly spiralled out of control. Cannibalism and infanticide followed. Males became hypersexual, pansexual and, an increasing proportion, homosexual. Calhoun called this vortex “a behavioural sink”. Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction”

This study linked population growth, environmental degradation and urban violence. Similar behavioural tendencies became apparent within the poor housing conditions at the Pruitt-Igoe development in St Louis. This development is now used as a key study of inhabitation by architects and urban planners, Oscar Newman one of the main developers of this field, references the observations of inhabitation at this establishment in his book Creating Defensible Space. He notes the stark difference between private space, which is clearly defined as personal territory, and the public space in this development. He notes that public spaces shared by relatively few families compared to those shared by many were much more hygienic and well-looked after, whereas those shared by larger numbers were often vandalised and unhygienic. He comments that the anonymity created by these largely shared public corridors and spaces “evoked no feelings of identity or control” This indicates our relationship with space affects our behaviour and use of space. In this example lack of feelings of ownership of the space led to negative behaviour within space and created feedback with negative effects on the well-being of the inhabitants.

The perception of space
This perception can otherwise be termed as awareness between our bodies and the awareness of other bodies, organisms and bodies around us. Perceived beauty and personal involvement within an environment are key factors, which determine our perception of space. As defined in the Measurement of Meaning by Osgood, Suci and Tannebaum the factors influencing the perception of space are these 3 things:

  1. Evaluation: Including the aesthetic, affective and symbolic meaning of space;
  2. Power: The energy requirements to adapt to a space; and
  3. Activity: Links to the noise within a space and the worker’s relationship and satisfaction with job and task.

In “Effects of the self-schema on perception of space at work” by Gustave Nicolas Fischer, Cyril Tarquinio, Jacqueline C. Vischer, the study conducted linking design and psychology in the workplace. In this study, they proposed a theoretical model linking environmental perception, work satisfaction and sense of self in a feedback loop.

There is also something to be said about the way our increasingly popular open office designs may contribute to less productivity and higher distractions, versus traditional cubicle-like workspaces. According to an article from Fortune, “Evidence is mixed on whether open plans actually foster collaboration, and studies have shown that open office plans decrease productivity and employee well-being while increasing the number of sick days workers take. […] A study by the architecture and design firm Gensler found that workers in 2013 spent 54 percent of their time on work requiring individual focus, up from 48 percent in 2008.” In order to combat this, future offices in our next generations will include sound-proof private rooms allowing workers to work solo without distraction, cubicle banks and private offices while continuing to sustain the open floor plan.

The System of Objects

Developed by Jean Baudrillard as part of his sociology doctorate thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects). In this he proposed the 4 object valuing criteria, these being:

  1. Function: A pen is used to write;
  2. Exchange or economic value: A piano being worth three chairs;
  3. Symbolic: An amethyst symbolising a birth in February; and
  4. Sign: The branding or prestige of an object, with no added function being valued over another, it may be used to suggest social values such as class.

In this way, the objects and human relationships with objects in the interior environment have significant psychological meaning and impact. In “Social Attributions Based on Domestic Interiors” by M.A. Wilson and N.E. Mackenzie, it is proposed that: “people’s interactions with the environment are determined by the meanings they attribute to it, and both stress the impact of expectations on behaviour within a particular environment.” The study they discuss further developed the theme, that objects and how we classify them, in turn, allows us to classify the social attributes of the owner of the objects, in relation to age and social class according to the object valuing system. This system suggests that our relationship with objects affects both our behaviour as we use objects according to their function, but also how we are perceived in the eyes of others. This makes our relationship with objects and space pivotal to our psychology.

Space-Time Relationships

Charles Rice references the thinking of Walter Benjamin, in The Emergence of the Interior, on the study of interiorisation and experience. He proposes that in our faster-paced modern society experiences are instantaneous and through this, we are missing long experiences such as a connection with tradition and the accumulation of wisdom over time. To reforge a sense of this relationship and address the current lack he demonstrates that we might materially create such a relationship through inanimate objects in our environment. Giving the example: “that the hearth and the mantelpiece might materially encode the mythical fireside and the situation it provided for the telling of stories.” In this way, one’s relationship with objects can embody a sense of experience and fulfil the desire for a connection with tradition.

Space and User Experience

In the article “Storied Spaces: Cultural Accounts of Mobility, Technology, and Environmental Knowing” by Johanna Brewer and Paul Dourish, it mentioned the three themes that are directly related to user-experience in terms of campus planning: legibility, literacy, and legitimacy. Legibility refers to “our understanding of how the place and/or space provide information for us, both socially and culturally”. Spatial Literacy refers to “how we interpret the information provided by the environment around us, the activities we engage in, and the relevance of those activities.” Legitimacy refers to “how we seek information and find relevance within the environment around us.” In the concept of campus design, legibility refers to the campus maps, signposts, as well as the lecture room numbers within the building. Literacy refers to the students’ feelings and behaviours within a certain environment in the building and what an interior promotes students to do and do not, in general user-experience. And legitimacy refers to the method that students use to engage themselves into this environment, as well as the reason that they come in and leave.

Space and Human Behavioural Cognition

The interaction between humans and spaces tends to reach a certain balance by their interaction. When individuals are in a certain interior environment, they not only express their physical behaviour, but also their emotions, thoughts, and willingness are impacted by the interior as well. According to what Ye Wenben mentioned in his article “Interior Design Psychology”, the ultimate goal of interior design is to lead human behavioural cognition in a positive way and reach a relatively harmonious dynamic balance through its impact towards humans in terms of user experience and mental conditions.

Security

Ye mentioned that within a certain space, it does not necessarily mean that the broader the space is, the better it is going to be for the users. The over-broad space tends to cause people a sense of loss and insecurity. The needs of safety and protection of people will make them willing to find certain objects to rely on. For example, in the environment of a train station and subway station, people do not tend to stay in the closest place to broad, instead multiple groups are formed and spread themselves around the waiting space, seats, and pillars, and maintain a certain space with other individuals. This concept of “security” has also prompted people to apply the use of interspersed space in order to provide a more stable and secure mentality within a space.

Self-Congestion

According to the journal: Does Space Matter? Assessing the Undergraduate “Lived Experience” to Enhance Learning, by using time-lapse cameras and three years of observing and measuring the interactions and activities of people within these public spaces, it summarised the notion of “self-congestion”: people tend to attract other people in public spaces even though they indicate that they prefer to get away from crowds. When it applies to interior design, we must also take in consideration gathered spaces instead of an evenly distributed distance with tables and chairs.

Privacy and Interpersonal Distance

Privacy is people’s basic need for the space, ensuring self-integrity, expressing one’s perspective towards life, is the fundamental proven of freedom and respect towards an individual. Private space is the independent interior space that is restricted by the external materials and stabilised by one’s mental awareness. It involves the relative requirements of visions and sounds within the space. Due to the different social scenario and interaction needs, the application for privacy and personal distances also have a clear discipline.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_design_psychology >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Disability Rights International

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Disability Rights International (DRI), formerly Mental Disability Rights International, is a Washington, DC–based human rights advocacy organisation dedicated to promoting the human rights and full participation in society of persons with disabilities worldwide. DRI documents conditions, publishes reports, and promotes international oversight of the rights of persons with disabilities.

DRI was founded in 1993 by attorney Eric Rosenthal and jointly established by the Washington College of Law Centre for Human Rights and the Bazelon Centre for Mental Health Law. Since 1993, DRI has expanded offices into three countries including Serbia, Mexico, and Ukraine.

Reports and Press Coverage

Since its founding, DRI has published reports on conditions and experiences of persons with disabilities including:

  • Human Rights and Mental Health: Uruguay (1995)
  • Human Rights and Mental Health: Hungary (1997)
  • Human Rights and Mental Health, Mexico (2000)
  • Human Rights of People with Mental Disabilities, Kosovo (2002)
  • Human Rights and Mental Health in Peru (2004)
  • Behind Closed Doors: Human Rights Abuses in the Psychiatric Facilities, Orphanages and Rehabilitation Centres of Turkey (2005)
  • Hidden Suffering: Romania’s Segregation and Abuse of Infants and Children with Disabilities (2006)
  • Ruined Lives: Segregations from Society in Argentina’s Psychiatric Asylums (2007)
  • Torment Not Treatment: Serbia’s Segregation and Abuse of Children and Adults with Disabilities (2007)
  • The Rights of Children with Disabilities in Vietnam: Bringing Vietnam’s Laws into compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2009)
  • Torture Not Treatment: Electric Shock and Long-Term Restraint in the United States on Children and Adults with Disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Centre (2010)
  • Abandoned and Disappeared: Mexico’s Segregation and Abuse of Children and Adults with Disabilities (2010)
  • Guatemala: Precautionary Measures Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2012)
  • The Rights of Persons with Mental Disabilities in the new Mexican Criminal Justice System (2013)

DRI has an article in UNICEF’s 2013 State of the World’s Children Report focused on children with disabilities.

On 27 June 2009, MindFreedom International announced that Laurie Ahern had been named president of DRI.

Worldwide Campaign to End the Institutionalisation of Children

Founded by President Laurie Ahern, DRI has led a campaign worldwide campaign to end the institutionalisation of children. The goal of the Worldwide Campaign to End the Institutionalisation of Children is to challenge underlying policies that lead to abuses against children on a global scale. One of the main drivers of institutionalisation – particularly in developing countries – is the use of misdirected foreign assistance funding to build new institutions or rebuild old crumbling facilities, instead of providing assistance and access to services for families who want to keep their children at home. Disability Rights International will document the role of international funders in perpetuating the segregation of children with disabilities.

Findings by DRI on conditions of institutionalised children includes:

  • In Mexico, there is almost no official oversight of children in private institutions, and children have literally “disappeared” from public record. Preliminary evidence suggests that children with disabilities have been “trafficked” into forced labour or sex slavery;
  • In the United States, children with autism and other mental disabilities living at a residential school in Massachusetts are being given electric shocks as a form of “behaviour modification”;
  • Children with autism in Paraguay and Uruguay were found locked in cages;
  • In Turkey, children as young as 9 years old were being given electro-shock treatments without anaesthesia until we exposed the barbaric treatment;
  • In Romania, we found teenagers with both mental and physical disabilities hidden away in an adult psychiatric institution – near death from intentional starvation. Some of the teens weighed less than 30 pounds; and
  • In Russia, we uncovered thousands of neglected infants and babies in the “lying down rooms”, where row after row of babies with disabilities both live and die in their cribs.

International Policy Advocacy

DRI has advocated in over 25 countries. Primarily, DRI has focused on:

  • Promoting worldwide recognition of abuse as torture
  • Recognition of international disability rights in the United States
  • Promoting the CRPD in international oversight and enforcement systems
  • Working to end international support for new institutions and segregated service systems

As a result of DRI’s work:

  • Brought about worldwide recognition of disability rights as international human rights
  • Documented abuses and supported activists in 25 countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East
  • Helped to draft the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, recently signed by President Obama and ratified by more than 70 countries
  • Exposed and closed abusive institutions and fostered the creation of human and dignified services, allowing people with disabilities to live in the community
  • Eradicated the use of cages in several countries where children and adults with disabilities were imprisoned for years
  • Used international human rights legal systems to protect the human rights of people with disabilities
  • Stopped the use of unmodified ECT (shock treatment without anaesthesia) in Turkey to which more than 15,000 children and adults were subject every year
  • Pressured the European Union (EU) to add disability rights to the EU’s human rights considerations for EU membership
  • Created disability advocacy movements in countries where there were none
  • Succeeded in including protection for children and adults with disabilities, warehoused and abused for a lifetime, under the United Nations Convention Against Torture

Women’s Rights Initiative

DRI’s Women’s Rights Initiative focuses on challenging the “double discrimination” women with disabilities face—both because of their gender and disability. DRI documents and exposes abuses against this population, sensitises government authorities and civil society organisations about the importance of addressing disability from a gender perspective, and works with women’s rights groups to encourage them to include a disability perspective in their agenda. DRI’s recent work in this area includes:

  • Mexico: DRI helped establish a Women’s Committee formed by women with a psychosocial disability that belong to the Colectivo Chuhcan, Mexico’s first advocacy organization run by persons with psychosocial disabilities. DRI helps empower these activists to become spokespersons for women with psychosocial disabilities at the local and national level.
  • Guatemala: After documenting sexual abuse and trafficking of women and girls with disabilities in a Guatemalan psychiatric hospital, DRI filed a petition with before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IACHR ordered Guatemala to take urgent measures to protect the women detained in this facility. DRI is currently working with the Guatemalan government to ensure that an end is brought to the sexual abuse and trafficking against women and girls.
  • Ukraine: Ukraine’s local office focuses on the rights of women and children who are institutionalised or at-risk of institutionalisation. DRI has documented numerous abuses against women in Ukraine’s institutions, including: non-consensual medical abortions; forced birth control and gynaecological exams; and forced separation of mothers from their children. DRI’s local office in Ukraine also reaches out to and empowers women recovering from eating disorders — a population which is at high-risk for psychiatric institutionalisation.

Serbia Controversy

Notably, in November 2007, DRI released a controversial report on conditions in psychiatric institutions in Serbia. DRI’s report, which showed pictures of emaciated children and adults tied to beds, called many of the abuses “tantamount to torture”. On an NBC News report before the report released, a Serbian official admitted that problems existed. Following the release of the report, however, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica described the allegations raised as “malicious”. Five days after the report released, members of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture arrived to assess the problem of abuse in mental institutions in Serbia. Serbian government representatives promised to improve conditions in Serbian institutions.

Awards

Henry Viscardi Achievement Awards (2013)

Laurie Ahern, President of DRI received the prestigious award given by Viscardi centre to exceptional leaders in the field of disability activism.

Charles Bronfman Award (2013)

DRI was awarded the Charles Bronfman Award recognising DRI’s work in awakening the world’s conscience to protect the human rights of children and adults with disabilities; documenting the segregation and abusive treatment of people with disabilities in dozens of countries; training and inspiring disability and human rights activists; and appealing to governments and world bodies to protect a vulnerable and overlooked population.

Senator Paul and Mrs. Sheila Wellstone Mental Health Visionary Award (2009)

Disability Rights International was awarded the 2009 Wellstone Award. The Award was established by the Washington Psychiatric Society to recognise visionary work and actions benefiting parity in mental health, and fighting the stigma of discrimination of mental illness.

American Psychiatric Association’s Human Rights Award (2009)

Disability Rights International was awarded the APA’s 2009 Human Rights Award, bestowed by the Council on Global Psychiatry, a component of the APA. The Human Rights Award was established in 1990 to recognise individuals and organisations that exemplify the capacity of human beings to protect others from damage related to the professional, scientific, and clinical dimensions of mental health, at the hands of other human beings. Past recipients of the APA Human Rights Award include President Jimmy Carter and Roselyn Carter, Senators Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici, Justice Richard Goldstone and Physicians for Human Rights.

Henry B. Betts Award (2008)

Eric Rosenthal, executive director of Disability Rights International was awarded the prestigious Henry B. Betts Award by the American Association of People with Disabilities. The Betts Award is named in honour of Henry B. Betts, M.D., a pioneer in the field of rehabilitation medicine who started his career with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago in 1964 and has devoted himself to improving the quality of life for people with disabilities.

Thomas J. Dodd Award in International Justice and Human Rights (2007)

The Thomas J. Dodd Research Centre at the University of Connecticut awarded Disability Rights International the 2007 Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights Prize. Disability Rights International was awarded for its efforts in advancing the cause of international justice and global human rights.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_Rights_International >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Meant by Healthy Building?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Healthy building refers to an emerging area of interest that supports the physical, psychological, and social health and well-being of people in buildings and the built environment. Buildings can be key promoters of health and well-being since most people spend a majority of their time indoors. According to the National Human Activity Pattern Survey, Americans spend “an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and about 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles.”

Healthy building can be seen as the next generation of green building that not only includes environmentally responsible and resource-efficient building concepts, but also integrates human well-being and performance. These benefits can include “reducing absenteeism and presenteeism, lowering health care costs, and improving individual and organisational performance.” In 2017, Joseph G. Allen and Ari Bernstein of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building: ventilation, air quality, thermal health, moisture, dusts and pests, safety and security, water quality, noise, and lighting and views.

Refer to Mental Environment and Healing Environments.

Integrated Design

Healthy building involves many different concepts, fields of interest, and disciplines. 9 Foundations describes healthy building as an approach built on building science, health science, and building science. An integrated design team can consist of stakeholders and specialists such as facility managers, architects, building engineers, health and wellness experts, and public health partners. Conducting charrettes with an integrated design team can foster collaboration and help the team develop goals, plans, and solutions.

Buildings and Health Components

There are many different components that can support health and well-being in buildings.

Indoor Air Quality

Spengler considers indoor air quality as an important determinant of healthy design. Buildings with poor indoor air quality can contribute to chronic lung diseases such as asthma, asbestosis and lung cancer. Chemical emissions can be outgassed by building materials, furnishings, and supplies. Air fresheners, cleaning products, paints, printing, flooring, and wax and polish products can also be a source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and semi-volatile compound (SVOCs). The LEED v4 Handbook posits that indoor air quality is “one of the most pivotal factors in maintaining building occupants’ safety, productivity, and well-being.”

Ventilation

Higher rates of ventilation affect indoor pollutants, odours, and the perceived freshness of air by diluting contaminants in the air. ASHRAE’s Standard 55-2017 has minimum standards of 8.3 L/s/person. In one study, raising the rate to 15 L/s/person increased performance by 1.1% and decreased sick building symptoms by 18.8%. Whole Building Design Guide recommends separating ventilation from thermal conditioning so as to increase comfort.

Natural ventilation is discouraged in buildings that have strict filtration requirements, contaminant dilution concerns, special pressure relationships, speech privacy concerns, and internal heat load demands. The San Joaquin ASHRAE chapter recommends assessing the outside air quality and configuration of the façade and building before demonstrating compliance and control of natural ventilation. ASHRAE Standard 55-2017 section 6.4 requires the natural ventilation be “manually controlled or controlled through the use of electrical or mechanical actuators under direct occupant control.” Chris Schaffner, CEO of the Green Engineer, describes operable windows as the “HVAC engineer’s ultimate safety factor.” Spengler and Chen recommend natural ventilation being used wherever possible.

Dust and Pests

Dust and dirt can be a source of exposure to VOC and lead as well as pesticides and allergens. High efficiency filter vacuums can remove particles such as dander and allergens that otherwise result in breathing issues. A study of asthmatic children in inner city urban communities suggests they became sensitive to the presence of cockroaches, mice, or rats due to their presence in their homes.

The Use of Disposable Material

The US culture relies heavily on disposable products, especially within healthcare, to minimize on cost and time. In hospitals, for example, healthcare providers cut on costs associated with sterilising equipment between patient cares by using ready-to-use disposable trays. However, this may at a cost to the environment; in one study, disposable cotton towels were suspected to have an adverse environmental impact. It is estimated that cotton production requires 6.6 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents and 0.024 kg of nitrogen emissions, in addition to a substantial amount of water, fertiliser and work. Healthcare managers are urged to request transparency of medical product production (and waste management) lines to provide assurance that products used have zero or minimal impacts on human health and our environment.

Thermal Comfort

Thermal comfort is influenced by factors like air temperature, mean radiant temperature, relative humidity, air speed, metabolic rate, and clothing. Thermal conditions can affect learning, cognitive performance, task completion, disease transmission, and sleep. ASHRAE defines an acceptable thermal environment as one that 80% of occupants find acceptable, though individual occupant thermal control results in higher satisfaction of occupants. Indoor spaces that are not air conditioned can create indoor heat waves if the outside air cools but the thermal mass of the building traps the hotter air inside. Cedeño-Laurent et al. believe these may become worse as climate change increases the “frequency, duration, and intensity of heat waves” and will be harder to adjust to in areas that are designed for colder climates.

Moisture and Humidity

The Whole Building Design Guide recommends the indoor relative humidity to be between 30 and 50% to prevent unwanted moisture and to design for proper drainage and ventilation. Moisture is introduced into the building either by rainwater intrusion, outside humid air infiltration, internally generated moisture, and vapor diffusion through the building envelope. High temperatures, precipitation, and building age enable mould. It contributes to mould and poor indoor air quality. Vapor retarders have traditionally been used to prevent moisture in walls and roofs.

Noise

While noise is not always controllable, it has a high correlation and causation relationship with mental health, stress, and blood pressure. One study suggests that there is a higher correlation of noise irritation and bodily pain or discomfort in women. Effects of excessive noise pollution include hearing impairment, speech intelligibility, sleep disturbance, physiological functions, mental illness, and performance. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends creating a “National Plan for a Sustainable Noise Indoor Environment” specific to each country.

Water Quality

Water quality can be contaminated by inorganic chemicals, organic chemicals, and microorganisms. The WHO considers waterborne diseases to be one of the world’s major health concerns, especially for developing countries and children. WHO recommends following water safety plans that include management, maintenance, good design, cleaning, temperature management, and preventing stagnation. Stagnant water is found to deteriorate the microbiological quality of water, and increase corrosion, odours, and taste issues. The bacterial pathogen Legionella may have a higher potential for growth in large buildings due to long water distribution systems and not enough maintenance.

Awareness of these issues is recommended by the WHO in order to maintain water quality:

  • Backflow
  • Cross connections
  • External quality management
  • Independent water supply
  • Material use
  • Minimisation of dead ends and stagnation
  • Seasonal use areas
  • Storage tank integrity
  • Water pressure
  • Water temperature

Safety and Security

Concerns of safety affect the mental and possibly physical health of residents by reducing the amount of physical activity. Fear of crime can result in less physical activity as well as increased social isolation. Atkinson posits that crime is based on motivated offenders, targets, and the absence of guardians. Adjusting these in buildings may increase presumed safety.

Lighting and View

The type and timing of light throughout the day affects circadian rhythms and human physiology. In a study done by Shamsul et al., cool white light and artificial daylight (approximately 450-480 nanometres) was associated with higher levels of alertness. Blue light positively affects mood, performance, fatigue, concentration, and eye comfort and enabled better sleep at night. Bright light during winter has also been shown to improve self-reported health and reduce distress.

Daylighting refers to providing access to natural daylight, which can be aesthetically pleasing and improve sleep duration and quality. The LEED handbook writes that daylighting can save energy while “increasing the quality of the visual environment” and occupant satisfaction.

Views to green landscapes can significantly increase attention and stress recovery. They can also have a positive influence on emotional states. Ko et al. consider views to be “important for the comfort, emotion, and working memory and concentration of occupants.” Providing a view to nature through a glass window may benefit occupants’ well-being and increase employee’s effectiveness.

Site Selection

Creating a walkable environment that connects people to workplaces, green spaces, public transportation, fitness centres, and other basic needs and services can influence daily physical activity as well as diet and type of commute. In particular, proximity to green spaces (e.g., parks, walking trails, gardens) or therapeutic landscapes can reduce absenteeism and improve well-being.

Building Design

There are many aspects of a building that can be designed to support positive health and well-being. For example, creating well-placed collaboration and social areas (e.g. break rooms, open collaboration areas, café spaces, courtyard gardens) can encourage social interaction and well-being. Quiet and wellness rooms can provide quiet zones or rooms that help improve well-being and mindfulness. Specifically, a designated lactation room can support nursing mothers by providing privacy and helping them return to work more easily.

Biophilic design has been linked to health outcomes such as stress reduction, improved mood, cognitive performance, social engagement, and sleep. Ergonomics can also minimize stress and strain on the body by providing ergonomically designed workstations.

Occupant Engagement

While some components of healthy buildings are inherently designed into the built environment, other components rely on the behavioural change of occupants, users, or organisations residing within the building. Well-lit and accessible stairwells can provide building occupants the opportunity to increase regular physical activity. Fitness centres or an exercise room can encourage exercise during the work day, which can improve mood and performance, leading to improved focus and better work-based relationships. Exercise can also be promoted by encouraging alternative means of transportation (e.g. cycling, walking, running) to and from the building. Providing facilities such as bicycle storage and locker/changing rooms can increase the appeal of cycling, walking, or running. Active workstations, such as of sit/stand desks, treadmill desks, or cycle desks, can encourage increased movement and exercise as well. “Behavioural measures” can be taken to “encourage better public health outcomes: e.g. reducing sedentary behaviours by increasing access to stairways, using more active transportation options, and working at sit-to-stand desks.” Other examples that can promote health and well-being include establishing workplace wellness programmes, health promotion campaigns, and encouraging activity and collaboration.

Infectious Disease

ASHRAE states that “Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through the air is sufficiently likely that airborne exposure to the virus should be controlled. Changes to building operations, including the operation of heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems, can reduce airborne exposures.” Current recommendations include increasing air supply and exhaust ventilation, using operable windows, limiting air recirculation, increasing hours of ventilation system operation and upgraded filtration. Joseph Allen of the Healthy Buildings Programme at Harvard suggests 4-6 air changes per hour in classrooms, especially when masks are off.

Proper ventilation of areas has been found to have the same effect as vaccinating 50-60% of the population for influenza. Enhanced filtration using a MERV 13 filter would be adequate to protect against transmission of viruses. Allen mentions three ways humidity can affect transmission: respiratory health, decaying, and virus evaporation. Drier air also dries out the respiratory cilia that catch particles. Viruses decay faster between 40 and 60% humidity. Respiratory droplets that become aerosols are less likely to do so at higher humidity. After 60%, mould growth begins to be encouraged.

Sustainable design of patient rooms, intensive care units, and courtyards could offer opportunities to not only maximise on human safety and wellbeing, but also environmental energy efficiency, waste management recycling, and performance optimization – all of which constitute the core of sustainability. However, this may come at an unexpected cost of enabling growth and spread of opportunistic microbes.

Health and Well-being in Standards and Rating Systems

There are several international and governmental standards, guidelines, and building rating systems that incorporate health and well-being concepts:

  • AirRated
  • ANSI/ASHRAE/USGBC/IES Standard 189.1-2014, Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings
  • BAIOTEQ
  • Fitwel
  • General Services Administration Facilities Standards for the Public Buildings Service (P-100)
  • Green Building Initiative Green Globes
  • Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
  • United States Department of Defence Unified Facilities Criteria Programme
  • WELL Building Standard

GreenSeal Standards for Healthy Buildings and Schools

Founded in 1989, GreenSeal is a leading global ecolabeling organization (that is part of The Global Ecolabelling Network) that has set strict criteria for occupant health, sustainability, and product performance. The Healthy Green Schools & Colleges initiative assists facility managers in locating low- or no-cost actions that have a significant impact on indoor air quality and health. The curriculum covers the full spectrum of facilities management methods and was created in collaboration with renowned school facility management professionals:

  • Indoor Air Quality Testing and Monitoring
  • Cleaning and Disinfecting
  • Integrated Pest control
  • Sustainable Purchasing
  • HVAC and Electric management
  • Training and intercommunications

WELL Building Standard Certification

The WELL Building Standard Certification was first launched in 2014 (WELL v1), and it focuses on the well-being and health of occupants in buildings. It was developed by Delos Living LLC and is currently administered by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) who released the second version (WELL v2) in 2020. Generally speaking, WELL v2 has updated requirements for investigating the relationship between building design and human health, adds more diversity to spaces and applications of the standard, and features a single rating system that resembles USGBC LEED’s efforts.

More specifically, WELL v1 discussed 100 performance features that can be considered for the certification of a building. Those 100 performance features are classified into 7 “concepts” as follows: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Fitness, Comfort, and Mind. Of these 100 features, 41 were required preconditions, and 59 were optional optimisations. In order to achieve a WELL certification, a building has to meet the following:

  • For a WELL silver certification: 41 required preconditions.
  • For a WELL gold certification: all the requirements for silver certification plus 40% optimisations.
  • For a WELL platinum certification: all the requirements for gold certification plus 80% optimisations.

On the other hand, WELL v2 uses a four-certification system that mimics LEED’s scoring system. The required preconditions are decreased to only 23 (vs. 41 in v1), and the optimisations rose to 92 (vs. 59 in v1). WELL v2 also added 3 more “concepts”: Sound, Materials and Community. With these updates, more buildings could qualify for a certification under the new system:

  • For a WELL bronze certification: 40 points are required (this is only available for shell and core buildings)
  • For a WELL silver certification: 50 points are required.
  • For a WELL gold certification: 60 points are required.
  • For a WELL platinum certification: 80 points are required.

There are some caveats with WELL v2, however. For instance, a building has to meet all required 23 preconditions before qualifying a certification. If one precondition is not satisfied, the building may not proceed with WELL standard certification irrespective of how many points achieved. Additionally, a building must earn at least 4 points in the “Thermal Comfort” and “Air” concepts, and 2 points at minimum in the remainder of the concepts. Lastly, a building can attain a maximum of 110 points because of an additional 10 points that could be achieved for innovation and performance.

Based on most recent surveys more than 72M square feet of residential and commercial spaces have been certified around the globe to date.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_building >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Healing Environments

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

Healing environment, for healthcare buildings describes a physical setting and organisational culture that supports patients and families through the stresses imposed by illness, hospitalisation, medical visits, the process of healing, and sometimes, bereavement. The concept implies that the physical healthcare environment can make a difference in how quickly the patient recovers from or adapts to specific acute and chronic conditions.

Refer to Mental Environment and Healthy Building.

Background

The original concept of the healing environment was developed by Florence Nightingale whose theory of nursing called for nurses to manipulate the environment to be therapeutic (Nightingale, F. 1859). Nightingale outlined in detail the requirements of the “sick room” to minimise suffering and optimise the capacity of a patient to recover, including quiet, warmth, clean air, light, and good diet. Early healthcare design followed her theories outlined in her treatise, “Notes on Hospitals”. Following the discoveries by Louis Pasteur and others which lead to the Germ Theory, plus other technologies, the role of the environment was dominated by infection control and technological advances.

Starting in the 1960s, healing environments have been linked with evidence-based design (EBD), giving the concept a strong scientific base. While in some respects it can be said that the concept of healing environments has evolved into EBD, it’s mainly in the area of reduction of stress that this overlap occurs; as EBD goes beyond the healing environments dimension to consider the effect of the built environment on patient clinical outcomes in the areas of staff stress and fatigue, patient stress, and facility operational efficiency and productivity to improve quality and patient safety. A 1984 study by Roger Ulrich found that surgical patients with a view of nature suffered fewer complications, used less pain medication and were discharged sooner than those who looked out on a brick wall. Since then, many studies have followed, showing impact of several environmental factors on several health outcomes.

Today, the philosophy that guides the concept of the healing environment is rooted in research in the neurosciences, environmental psychology, psychoneuroimmunology, and evolutionary biology. The common thread linking these bodies of research is the physiological effects of stress on the individual and the ability to heal. Psychologically supportive environments enable patients and families to cope with and transcend illness.

Goal

The goal of creating a healing environment is to reduce stress, and thereby reduce associated problems such as medical error, inability to concentrate, and physical symptoms of stress that can affect logical thought process. While use of EBD techniques would not necessarily make an environment a healing one, through EBD we can define environmental factors that can help to ease stress and thereby result in a healing environment. Malkin emphasizes the contribution of research to concepts that can create a healing environment, but just the inclusion do not make setting a ‘healing environment’. The design team needs to translate the EBD into design solutions unique to the individual hospital.

According to “The Business Case for Creating a Healing Environment” written by Jain Malkin, the physical setting has the potential to be therapeutic if it achieves the following:

  • Eliminates environmental stressors such as noise, glare, lack of privacy and poor air quality;
  • Connects patients to nature with views to the outdoors, interior gardens, aquariums, water elements, etc.;
  • Offers options and choices to enhance feelings of being in control – these may include privacy versus socialisation, lighting levels, type of music, seating options, quiet versus ‘active’ waiting areas;
  • Provides opportunities for social support – seating arrangements that provide privacy for family groupings, accommodation for family members or friends in treatment setting; sleep-over accommodation in patient rooms;
  • Provides positive distractions such as interactive art, fireplaces, aquariums, Internet connection, music, access to special video programmes with soothing images of nature accompanied by music developed specifically for the healthcare setting; and
  • Engenders feelings of peace, hope, reflection and spiritual connection and provides opportunities for relaxation, education, humour and whimsy.

Importance of Lighting and Sound

Lighting

80% of what we interpret of our surroundings comes to us from what we see of our environment and that is greatly affected by the light available in that environment. Lighting design in healthcare environments is a major factor in creating healing situations. Since the design of healthcare environments is said to influence patient’s outcomes, yet high costs prevent most hospitals from renovating or rebuilding, changes in lighting becomes a cost-effective way to improve existing environments. It is proven that people who are surrounded by natural light are more productive and live healthier lives. When patients are sick, and surrounded by medical equipment and white walls, the last thing they need is a dark, stuffy room. This is why it is important for every room to have a window for natural light to come into and help create a healing environment for the patient.

The Auditory Environment

While so much of the patient’s experience is based on visual cues, the majority of meaning of their experience is auditory. The many sounds of a hospital are foreign to their experience and their line of sight is limited. Nightingale claimed that sounds that create “anticipation, expectation, waiting, and fear of surprise … damage the patient.” Add to the perception and meaning attribute to any sound the factors of age-related hearing impairment common to older patients, heavy medication, pain, and other conditions, cognition is impacted as is the ability to understand language. Hospital noise, at any volume level, is credited with being the primary cause of sleep deprivation, a contributing factor in delirium, and a risk factor for errors. The current pressure to reduce noise at night has been mistakenly understood to mean undue quiet at night when patients most need cues that people are around them and available if they need help. Just s lighting must be designed to serve both day and night, so much the auditory environment be designed to support activity, cognition, rest, and sleep.

Adding to the above, patients need positive visual and auditory stimulation. Nightingale called for variety, colour, and form as a means of arousing creativity and health in patients. Currently, using appropriate art, nature imagery and music are found to improve the experience of the patient. Technologies have afforded patients infinite options to use media as the choose. The addition of beauty must also be accompanied by an attention to orderliness: removal of clutter, trash, and other distractions.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing_environments >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Environmental Psychology

Published on by Andrew Marshall3 Comments

Introduction

Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world.

It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental Psychology emphasizes how humans change the environment and how the environment changes humans’ experiences and behaviours. The field defines the term environment broadly, encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. According to an article on APA Psychnet, environmental psychology is when a person thinks of a plan, travels to a certain place, and follows through with the plan throughout their behaviour.

Environmental psychology was not fully recognised as its own field until the late 1960s when scientists began to question the tie between human behaviour and our natural and built environments. Since its conception, the field has been committed to the development of a discipline that is both value oriented and problem oriented, prioritising research aimed at solving complex environmental problems in the pursuit of individual well-being within a larger society. 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 respond well. This model can help design, manage, protect and/or restore environments that enhance reasonable behaviour, predict the likely outcomes 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 behaviour. Lately, alongside the increased focus on climate change in society and the social sciences and the re-emergence of limits-to-growth concerns, there has been an increased focus on environmental sustainability issues within the field.

This multidisciplinary paradigm has not only characterised the dynamic for which environmental psychology is expected to develop, but it has also been the catalyst in attracting other schools of knowledge in its pursuit, aside from research psychologists. Geographers, economists, landscape architects, policy-makers, sociologists, anthropologists, educators, and product developers all have discovered and participated in this field.

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, ecological psychology, ecopsychology, environment–behaviour studies, and person–environment studies. Closely related fields include architectural psychology, socio-architecture, behavioural geography, environmental sociology, social ecology, and environmental design research.

Refer to Mental Environment.

Brief History

The origins of the field can be traced to the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who drew attention to the power of nature and the significance of human interaction with it. Darwin pointed to the role of the environment in shaping evolution. This idea was quickly applied to human interactions with the surroundings. An extreme Victorian acceptance of this were ‘environmental determinists’ who insisted the physical environment and climate influenced the evolution of racial characteristics. Willy Hellpach is said to be the first to mention “environmental psychology”. One of his books, Geopsyche, discusses topics such as how the sun and the moon affect human activity, the impact of extreme environments, and the effects of color and form (Pol, E., 2006, Blueprints for a history of environmental psychology (I): From first birth to American transition. “Medio Ambiente y Comportamiento Humano”, 7(2), 95-113). Among the other major scholars at the roots of environmental psychology were Jakob von Uexküll, Kurt Lewin, Egon Brunswik, and later Gerhard Kaminski and Carl Friedrich Graumann.

The end of World War II brought about a demand for guidance on the urgent building programme after the destruction of war. To provide government planning requirements many countries set up research centres that studied how people used space. In the UK the Building Research Centre studied space use in houses and later noise levels, heating and lighting requirements. The glass maker Pilkingtons set up a daylight research unit, led by Thomas Markus to provide information on the influence of natural lighting in buildings and guidelines on daylight requirements. Peter Manning developed this further at the Pilkington Research Unit at the University of Liverpool in the 1960s. He studied offices, employing one of the first people to obtain a Ph.D. in environmental psychology, Brian Wells. Markus went on to set up the Building Performance Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde in 1968 employing the psychologist David Canter who had been supervised by Wells and Manning for his Ph.D. with the Pilkington Research Unit. Canter then went on to the University of Surrey to set up Environmental Psychology programme there in 1971 with the Department of Psychology. The head of that Department was Terence Lee who had conducted his Ph.D. on the concept of neighbourhood under the supervision of Sir Frederick Bartlett at the University of Cambridge.

In parallel with these developments people in the US had begun to consider the issues in environmental design. One of the first areas was the consideration of psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatrists worked with architects to take account of the experience of patients who were mentally ill. Robert Sommer wrote his book on ‘Personal Space’ and Edward T Hall commented as an anthropologist on how people related to each other spatially. Amos Rapoport caused considerable interest amongst architects with his book ‘House Form and Culture’, showing that the form of buildings was not solely functional but had all sorts of cultural influences. This contributed to the emergence in architecture of ‘post-modernism’ which took the symbolic qualities of architecture very seriously. These early developments in the 1960s and 1970s were often seen as part of ‘architectural psychology’. It was when Harold Proshansky and William Ittelson set up the Environmental Psychology program at the City University of New York Graduate Center that the term Environmental Psychology replaces Architectural Psychology as the widely used term for the study of the ways in which people made sense of and interacted with their surroundings. This was institutionalised when Canter established The Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980 with Kenneth Craik a personality psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. President Nixon’s campaign to deal with depredations of the environment gave impetus to a change of direction in the field from aspects of buildings and making sense of cities to the broader issues of climate change and the impact of people in the global environment.

Environmental Psychologist

Environmental psychologists are the ones who study the relationship between human behaviour and the environment that surrounds them. These psychologist study any type of environment, even the ones who are “built” such as peoples homes. They study how we as humans behave and interact in the world. As of May of 2020, the annual salary of an environmental psychologist is $82,180. The two sub-disciplines:

  • Conservation Psychology which is the study of the development of attitudes in the environment; and
  • Ecopsychology which is similar to conservation psychology, but it focuses on the ties of environmental and societal degradation.

Orientations

Problem Oriented

Environmental psychology is a direct study of the relationship between an environment and how that environment affects its inhabitants. Specific aspects of this field work by identifying a problem and through the identification of the said problem, discovering a solution. Therefore, it is necessary for environmental psychology to be problem-oriented.

One important aspect of a problem-oriented field is that by identifying problems, solutions arise from the research acquired. The solutions can aid in making society function better as a whole and create a wealth of knowledge about the inner workings of societies. Environmental psychologist Harold Proshansky discusses how the field is also “value-oriented” because of the field’s commitment to bettering society through problem identification. Panyang discusses the importance of not only understanding the problem but also the necessity of a solution. Proshansky also points out some of the problems of a problem-oriented approach for environmental psychology. First, the problems being identified must be studied under certain specifications: they must be ongoing and occurring in real life, not in a laboratory. Second, the notions about the problems must derive directly from the source – meaning they must come directly from the specific environment where the problem is occurring. The solutions and understanding of the problems cannot come from an environment that has been constructed and modelled to look like real life. Environmental psychology needs to reflect the actual society, not a society built in a laboratory setting. The difficult task of the environmental psychologist is to study problems as they are occurring in everyday life. It is hard to reject all laboratory research because laboratory experiments are where theories may be tested without damaging the actual environment or can serve as models when testing solutions. Proshansky makes this point as well, discussing the difficulty in the overall problem oriented approach. He states that it is important, however, for the environmental psychologist to utilise all aspects of research and analysis of the findings and to take into account both the general and individualized aspects of the problems.

Environmental psychology addresses environmental problems such as density and crowding, noise pollution, sub-standard living, and urban decay. Noise increases environmental stress. Although it has been found that control and predictability are the greatest factors in stressful effects of noise; context, pitch, source and habituation are also important variables. Environmental psychologists have theorised that density and crowding can also have an adverse effect on mood and may cause stress-related illness or behaviour. To understand and solve environmental problems, environmental psychologists believe concepts and principles should come directly from the physical settings and problems being looked at. For example, factors that reduce feelings of crowding within buildings include:

  • Windows – particularly ones that can be opened and ones that provide a view as well as light
  • High ceilings
  • Doors to divide spaces (Baum and Davies) and provide access control
  • Room shape – square rooms feel less crowded than rectangular ones (Dresor)
  • Using partitions to create smaller, personalized spaces within an open plan office or larger work space.
  • Providing increases in cognitive control over aspects of the internal environment, such as ventilation, light, privacy, etc.
  • Conducting a cognitive appraisal of an environment and feelings of crowding in different settings. For example, one might be comfortable with crowding at a concert but not in school corridors.
  • Creating a defensible space (Calhoun)

Personal Space and Territory

Proxemics is known as the study of human space. It also studies the effects that population has on human behaviour, communication, and social interaction. Having an area of personal territory in a public space, e.g. at the office, is a key feature of many architectural designs. Having such a ‘defensible space’ can reduce the negative effects of crowding in urban environments. The term, coined by John B. Calhoun in 1947, is the result of multiple environmental experiments conducted on rats. Originally beginning as an experiment to measure how many rats could be accommodated in a given space, it expanded into determining how rats, given the proper food, shelter and bedding would behave under a confined environment.

Under these circumstances, the males became aggressive, some exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, seeking every chance to mount any rat they encountered. As a result, mating behaviours were upset with an increase in infant mortalities. With parents failing to provide proper nests, thoughtlessly ditching their young and even attacking them, infant mortality rose as high as 96% in certain sections. Calhoun published the results as “Population Density and Social Pathology” in a 1962 edition of Scientific American.

Creating barriers and customising the space are ways of creating personal space, e.g., using pictures of one’s family in an office setting. This increases cognitive control as one sees oneself as having control over the competitors to the personal space and therefore able to control the level of density and crowding in the space. Personal space can be both good and bad. It is good when it is used as stated above. Creating “personal space” in an office or work setting can make one feel more comfortable about being at work. Personal space can be bad when someone is in your personal space. In the image to the right, one person is mad at the other person because she is invading her personal space by laying on her.

Systems Oriented

The systems-oriented approach to experimenting is applied to individuals or people that are a part of communities, groups, and organisations. These communities, groups, and organisations are systems in homeostasis. Homeostasis is known as the “state of steady conditions within a system.” This approach particularly examines group interaction, as opposed to an individual’s interaction and it emphasizes on factors of social integration. In the laboratory, experiments focus on cause and effect processes within human nature.

Interdisciplinary Oriented

Environmental psychology relies on interaction with other disciplines in order to approach problems with multiple perspectives. The first discipline is the category of behavioural sciences, which include: sociology, political science, anthropology, and economics. Environmental psychology also interacts with the inter-specialisations of the field of psychology, which include:

  • Developmental psychology;
  • Cognitive science;
  • Industrial and organisational psychology; psychobiology;
  • Psychoanalysis; and
  • Social neuroscience.

In addition to the more scientific fields of study, environmental psychology also works with the design field which includes: the studies of architecture, interior design, urban planning, industrial and object design, landscape architecture, and preservation.

Space-Over-Time Orientation

Space over time orientation highlights the importance of the past. Examining problems with the past in mind creates a better understanding of how past forces, such as social, political, and economic forces, may be of relevance to present and future problems. Time and place are also important to consider. It’s important to look at time over extended periods. Physical settings change over time; they change with respect to physical properties and they change because individuals using the space change over time. Looking at these spaces over time will help monitor the changes and possibly predict future problems.

Concepts

Nature Restoration

Environmental health shows the effects people have on the environment as well as the effects the environment has on people. From early studies showing that patients with a view of nature from their hospital recovered faster than patients with a window view of a brick wall, how, why, and to which extent nature has mental and physical restorative properties has been a central branch of the field. Although the positive effects of nature have been established, the theoretical underpinning of why it is restorative is still discussed. The most cited theory is the Attention Restoration Theory, which claims nature is a “soft fascination” which restores the ability to direct attention. It is said that being in nature can reduce stress. Studies show that it can reduce anger, improve mood, and even lower one’s blood pressure. Secondly, Stress reduction theory claims that because humans have evolved in nature, this type of environment is relaxing, and more adjusted to the senses. Newer theoretical work includes the Conditioned Restoration Theory, which suggests a two-step process. The first step involves associating nature with relaxation, and the second step involves retrieving the same relaxation when presented with an associated stimulus.

Place Identity

For many years Harold Proshansky and his colleagues at the Graduate School and University Centre of the City University of New York, explored the concept of place identity. Place identity has been traditionally defined as a ‘sub-structure of the self-identity of the person consisting of broadly conceived cognitions about the physical world in which the individual lives’. These cognitions define the daily experiences of every human being. Through one’s attitudes, feelings, ideas, memories, personal values and preferences toward the range and type of physical settings, they can then understand the environment they live in and their overall experience.

As a person interacts with various places and spaces, they are able to evaluate which properties in different environments fulfil his/her various needs. When a place contains components that satisfy a person biologically, socially, psychologically and/or culturally, it creates the environmental past of a person. Through ‘good’ or ‘bad’ experiences with a place, a person is then able to reflect and define their personal values, attitudes, feelings and beliefs about the physical world.

Place identity has been described as the individual’s incorporation of place into the larger concept of self; a “potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings”. Other theorists have been instrumental in the creation of the idea of place identity. Three humanistic geographers, Tuan (1980), Relph (1976) and Buttimer (1980), share a couple of basic assumptions. As a person lives and creates memories within a place, attachment is built and it is through one’s personal connection to a place, that they gain a sense of belonging and purpose, which then gives significance and meaning to their life.

Five central functions of place-identity have been depicted: recognition, meaning, expressive-requirement, mediating change, and anxiety and defence function. Place identity becomes a cognitive “database” against which every physical setting is experienced. The activities of a person often overlap with physical settings, which then create a background for the rest of life’s interactions and events. The individual is frequently unaware of the array of feelings, values or memories of a singular place and simply becomes more comfortable or uncomfortable with certain broad kinds of physical settings, or prefers specific spaces to others. In the time since the term “place identity” was introduced, the theory has been the model for identity that has dominated environmental psychology.

Place Attachment

According to the book, “Place Attachment”, place attachment is a “complex phenomenon that incorporates people-place bonding”. Many different perceptions of the bond between people and places have been hypothesized and studied. The most widespread terms include place attachment and sense of place. One consistent thread woven throughout most recent research on place attachment deals with the importance of the amount of time spent at a certain place (the length of association with a place). While both researchers and writers have made the case that time and experience in a place are important for deepening the meanings and emotional ties central to the person-place relationship, little in-depth research has studied these factors and their role in forging this connection.

Place attachment is defined as one’s emotional or affective ties to a place, and is generally thought to be the result of a long-term connection with a certain environment. This is different from a simple aesthetic response such as saying a certain place is special because it is beautiful. For example, one can have an emotional response to a beautiful (or ugly) landscape or place, but this response may sometimes be shallow and fleeting. This distinction is one that Schroeder labelled “meaning versus preference”. According to Schroeder the definition of “meaning” is “the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape”; whereas “preference” is “the degree of liking for one landscape compared to another”. For a deeper and lasting emotional attachment to develop (Or in Schroeder’s terms, for it to have meaning) an enduring relationship with a place is usually a critical factor. Chigbu carried out a rural study of place-attachment using a qualitative approach to check its impact on a community, Uturu (in Nigeria), and found that it has a direct relationship to the level of community development.

Environmental Consciousness

Leanne Rivlin theorised that one way to examine an individual’s environmental consciousness is to recognise how the physical place is significant, and look at the people/place relationship.

Environmental cognition (involved in human cognition) plays a crucial role in environmental perception. All different areas of the brain engage with environmentally relevant information. Some believe that the orbitofrontal cortex integrates environmentally relevant information from many distributed areas of the brain. Due to its anterior location within the frontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex may make judgments about the environment, and refine the organism’s “understanding” through error analysis, and other processes specific to the prefrontal cortex. But to be certain, there is no single brain area dedicated to the organism’s interactions with its environment. Rather, all brain areas are dedicated to this task. One area (probably the orbitofrontal cortex) may collate the various pieces of the informational puzzle in order to develop a long term strategy of engagement with the ever-changing “environment”. Moreover, the orbitofrontal cortex may show the greatest change in blood oxygenation (BOLD level) when an organism thinks of the broad, and amorphous category referred to as “the environment”. Research in this area is showing an increase in climate change related emotional experiences that are seen to be inherently adaptive. Engagement with these emotional experiences leads to a greater sense of connection with others and increased capacity to tolerate and reflect on emotions.

Because of the recent concern with the environment, environmental consciousness or awareness has come to be related to the growth and development of understanding and consciousness toward the biophysical environment and its problems.

Behaviour Settings

The earliest noteworthy discoveries in the field of environmental psychology can be dated back to Roger Barker who created the field of ecological psychology. Founding his research station in Oskaloosa, Kansas in 1947, his field observations expanded into the theory that social settings influence behaviour. Empirical data gathered in Oskaloosa from 1947 to 1972 helped him develop the concept of the “behaviour setting” to help explain the relationship between the individual and the immediate environment. This was further explored in his work with Paul Gump in the book Big School, Small School: High School Size and Student Behaviour. One of the first insightful explanations on why groups tend to be less satisfying for their members as they increase in size, their studies illustrated that large schools had a similar number of behaviour settings to that of small schools. This resulted in the students’ ability to presume many different roles in small schools (e.g. be in the school band and the school football team) but in larger schools, there was a propensity to deliberate over their social choices.

In his book Ecological Psychology (1968), Barker stresses the importance of the town’s behaviour and environment as the residents’ most ordinary instrument of describing their environment.

“The hybrid, eco-behavioral character of behavior settings appear to present Midwest’s inhabitants with no difficulty; nouns that combine milieu and standing behavior are common, e.g. oyster supper, basketball game, turkey dinner, golden gavel ceremony, cake walk, back surgery, gift exchange, livestock auction, auto repair.”

Barker argued that his students should implement T-methods (psychologist as ‘transducer’: i.e. methods in which they studied the man in his ‘natural environment’) rather than O-methods (psychologist as “operators” i.e. experimental methods). Basically, Barker preferred fieldwork and direct observation rather than controlled experiments. Some of the minute-by-minute observations of Kansan children from morning to night, jotted down by young and maternal graduate students, may be the most intimate and poignant documents in social science. Barker spent his career expanding on what he called ecological psychology, identifying these behaviour settings, and publishing accounts such as One Boy’s Day (1952) and Midwest and Its Children (1955).

Natural Environment Research Findings

Environmental psychology research has observed various concepts relating to humans’ innate connection to natural environments which begins in early childhood. One study shows that fostering children’s connectedness to nature will, in turn, create habitual pro-ecological behaviours in time. Exposure to natural environment may lead to a positive psychological well-being and form positive attitudes and behaviour towards nature. Connectedness to nature has shown to be a huge contributor to predicting people’s general pro-ecological and pro-social behaviours. Connectedness to nature has also been shown to benefit well-being, happiness, and general satisfaction. “Nature-deficit disorder” has recently been coined to explain the lack of connectedness to nature due to a lack of consciousness identification and nature disconnect. Further research is required to make definitive claims about the effects of connectedness to nature.

Applications

Impact on the Built Environment

Environmental psychologists rejected the laboratory-experimental paradigm because of its simplification and skewed view of the cause-and-effect relationships of human behaviours and experiences. Environmental psychologists examine how one or more parameters produce an effect while other measures are controlled. It is impossible to manipulate real-world settings in a laboratory.

Environmental psychology is oriented towards influencing the work of design professionals (architects, engineers, interior designers, urban planners, etc.) and thereby improving the human environment.

On a civic scale, efforts toward improving pedestrian landscapes have paid off, to some extent, from the involvement of figures like Jane Jacobs and Copenhagen’s Jan Gehl. One prime figure here is the late writer and researcher William H. Whyte. His still-refreshing and perceptive “City”, based on his accumulated observations of skilled Manhattan pedestrians, provides steps and patterns of use in urban plazas.

The role and impact of architecture on human behaviour is debated within the architectural profession. Views range from: supposing that people will adapt to new architectures and city forms; believing that architects cannot predict the impact of buildings on humans and therefore should base decisions on other factors; to those who undertake detailed precedent studies of local building types and how they are used by that society.

Environmental psychology has conquered the whole architectural genre which is concerned with retail stores and any other commercial venues that have the power to manipulate the mood and behaviour of customers (e.g. stadiums, casinos, malls, and now airports). From Philip Kotler’s landmark paper on Atmospherics and Alan Hirsch’s “Effects of Ambient Odors on Slot-Machine Usage in a Las Vegas Casino”, through the creation and management of the Gruen transfer, retail relies heavily on psychology, original research, focus groups, and direct observation. One of William Whyte’s students, Paco Underhill, makes a living as a “shopping anthropologist”. Most of this advanced research remains a trade secret and proprietary.

Environmental psychology is consulted thoroughly when discussing future city design. Eco-cities and eco-towns have been studied to determine the societal benefits of creating more sustainable and ecological designs. Eco-cities allow for humans to live in synch with nature and develop sustainable living techniques. The development of eco-cities requires knowledge in the interactions between “environmental, economic, political, and socio-cultural factors based on ecological principles”.

Organisations

  • Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a non-profit organisation that works to improve public spaces, particularly parks, civic centres, public markets, downtowns, and campuses. The staff of PPS is made up of individuals trained in environmental design, architecture, urban planning, urban geography, urban design, environmental psychology, landscape architecture, arts administration and information management. The organisation has collaborated with many major institutions to improve the appearance and functionality of public spaces throughout the US. In 2005, PPS co-founded The New York City Streets Renaissance, a campaign that worked to develop a new campaign model for transportation reform. This initiative implemented the transformation of excess sidewalk space in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan into public space. Also, by 2008, New York City reclaimed 49 acres (200,000 m2) of traffic lanes and parking spots away from cars and gave it back to the public as bike lanes and public plazas.
  • The Centre for Human Environments at the CUNY Graduate Centre is a research organisation that examines the relationship between people and their physical settings. CHE has five subgroups that specialise in aiding specific populations: The Children’s Environments Research Group, the Health and Society Research Group, the Housing Environments Research Group, the Public Space Research Group, and the Youth Studies Research Group.
  • The most relevant scientific groups are the International Association of People-Environment Studies (IAPS) and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).
  • Urban Ecology: The Urban Ecologist, and the International Eco-City Conference were some of the first collectives to establish the idea of eco-cities and townships.

Challenges

The field saw significant research findings and a fair surge of interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but has seen challenges of nomenclature, obtaining objective and repeatable results, scope, and the fact that some research rests on underlying assumptions about human perception, which is not fully understood. Being an interdisciplinary field is difficult because it lacks a solid definition and purpose. It is hard for the field to fit into organisational structures. In the words of Guido Francescato, speaking in 2000, environmental psychology encompasses a “somewhat bewildering array of disparate methodologies, conceptual orientations, and interpretations… making it difficult to delineate, with any degree of precision, just what the field is all about and what might it contribute to the construction of society and the unfolding of history.”

A grand challenge in the field of environmental psychology today is to understand the impact of human behaviour on the climate and climate change. Understanding why some people engage in pro-environment behaviours can help predict the necessary requirements to engage others in making sustainable change.

Environmental psychology has not received nearly enough supporters to be considered an interdisciplinary field within psychology. Harold M. Proshanksy was one of the founders of environmental psychology and was quoted as saying:

“As I look at the field of environmental psychology today, I am concerned about its future. It has not, since its emergence in the early 1960s grown to the point where it can match the fields of social, personality, learning or cognitive psychology. To be sure, it has increased in membership, in the number of journals devoted to it, and even in the amount of professional organizational support it enjoys, but not enough so that one could look at any major university and find it to be a field of specialization in a department of psychology, or, more importantly, in an interdisciplinary center or institute”.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_psychology >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Meant by a Mental Environment?

Published on by Andrew Marshall3 Comments

Introduction

The mental environment refers to the sum of all societal influences upon mental health.

Refer to An Overview of Environmental Psychology, Healing Environments, and Healthy Building.

Outline

The term is often used in a context critical of the mental environment in industrialised societies. It is argued that just as industrial societies produce physical toxins and pollutants which harm humans physical health, they also produce psychological toxins (e.g. television, excessive noise, violent marketing tactics, Internet addiction, social media) that cause psychological damage.

This poor mental environment may help explain why rates of mental illness are reportedly higher in industrial societies which might also have its roots in poor educational environment and mechanical routinised life present. Magico-religious beliefs are an important contribution of such communal settings. Delusions such as these rooted from childhood are often hard to completely regulate from a person’s life.

The idea has its roots in evolutionary psychology, as the deleterious consequences of a poor mental environment can be explained by the mismatch between the mental environment humans evolved to exist within and the one they exist within today.

“We live in both a mental and physical environment. We can influence the mental environment around us, but to a far greater extent we are influenced by the mental environment. The mental environment contains forces that affect our thinking and emotions and that can dominate our personal minds.” Marshall Vian Summers

Further Reading

Gebelein, B. (2007). The Mental Environment (Mostly about Mind Pollution). 1st Ed. Omdega Press. ISBN 978-0-9614611-2-6.

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What is Greyhound Therapy?

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Introduction

Greyhound therapy is a pejorative term used in the US health care system since the mid-1960s to refer to mental health authorities’ buying a ticket on a Greyhound Lines bus to get rid of possible “troublemaker” patients.

The practice is still in use in certain mental-health circles.

Diesel therapy or motorcoach therapy are similar terms for the practice and are usually used pejoratively.

Refer to Homelessness and Mental Health.

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