Environmental Psychology

Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field focused on the interplay between individuals and their surroundings.

Sound mental health requires much more than one simple intervention. A series of environmental and lifestyle factors play an important role too. Read on to learn more.

For many years there was an assumption that the extensive documentation of statistical associations between risky environments and mental disorders necessarily represented the operation of environmentally mediated causal mechanisms. Three considerations challenged that assumption

Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual. The nature-nurture debate is concerned with the relative contribution that both influences make to human behavior.

Environmental psychology aims to systematically and scientifically study the affect of the environment on humans as well as the human effects of their use of the natural environment.

All psychology could fit within a context of environmental psychology at its broadest application to conduct multiple studies to better catalog and understand psychological disorders and improve functionality of organizations.

Environmental psychology is concerned with space; from the intimate (personal space) through intermediate (proximal) spaces of the built environment (rooms, buildings, towns, cities etc), through to distant space involving study of the natural world, wildernesses and geographical space. Even the influence of weather on behaviour is a valid environmental psychology area.

What is Environmental Psychology? Find out with this introduction of the approach, overviews of behavior settings, attention restoration theory and defensible space theory.

Information about Becoming an Environmental Psychologist.

Environmental psychologists study the relationship between human behavior and the environment, from both directions - how the environment affects behavior, and how people's behaviors and attitudes affect the environment.