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Introduction To Environmental Psychology-Environmental Psychology-Handout, Exercises of Environmental Psychology

Its main topics are attitudes, alternate energy resource, crowding, ecological theories, stress, general adaption, Murray's theory, organism environment relationship, perception and its cognitive basses, probabilistic functionalism, social bases of attitude. This lecture includes: Introduction, Environmental, Psychology, Human, Actions, Debate, Extraction, Problem, Definition, Behavior

Typology: Exercises

2011/2012

Uploaded on 08/12/2012

lakshya
lakshya 🇮🇳

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Lesson 01

INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Until relatively recently only a few scientists and perhaps fewer public officials were concerned with the influence of advancing technology, population growth, and urbanization on the quality of the environment and ultimately on the quality of human existence. Technological advances were hailed for making dramatic improvements in the quality of life and for facilitating the endless search for comfort and luxury, without appreciation of the effects these advances were having on the quality of the environment. The term environment was rarely mentioned in the media and few legislators were making any concerted efforts to pass laws to protect it. Gradually, though, we have become aware of the delicate balance between the quality of the environment and the quality of human life, and we have come to realize that this balance can be easily upset by human actions.

The dangers of acid rain, the fallibility of nuclear power plants, and the difficulties in handling and disposing of toxic chemicals are coming to be appreciated. Other stark realizations are also being confronted. Among these are that the pace of suburban sprawl and urban decay is quickening; the depletion of nonrenewable resources is an inevitability; and cheap energy is a thing of the past. Chemicals such as dioxin, formaldehyde, PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl),/ and sulfur dioxide, once found only in the lexicon of scientists, are becoming household words, and heretofore unknown places like Love Canal, Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Three Mile Island are making nearly everyone's list of places they would rather not be. The credible capacity and propensity of humans to misuse and abuse the environment is now painfully apparent. Despite these seeming revelations, though, we have only begun to understand the human role in maintaining the health of the planet, to comprehend the effect of present actions on future outcomes, and to consider alternatives to environmentally destructive behaviors.

But begun we have, and today daily newspapers and the nightly news regularly report the abusive treatment received by our water, land, and air, as well as the rapid depletion of energy resources. Numerous local, state, and federal laws governing the use of our physical environment have been enacted and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been created. Steps are being taken to prevent massive oil spills at sea, to keep blast furnaces from belching ugly smoke and harmful particulates into the atmosphere, to preclude raw sewage and deadly chemicals from being discharged into water, and to forestall the accumulation of mountainous heaps of solid waste. Efforts are also being made to reduce energy consumption, to design buildings to promote human functioning, to plan for urban development, and to establish and preserve wilderness areas.

Despite the accelerated efforts of scientists, engineers, political and spiritual leaders, and the general public, environmental problems are far from being solved. Without doubt there has been increased concern by humans for their environment, but the wherewithal to turn this concern into effective remediating actions has not always been available.

The Environment Debate There are those who claim that the environment has already received sufficient abuse to render the planet uninhabitable by the twenty-second century They point with indignation to the number of species that have become extinct in the past 100 years, the desertification of once arable lines, the denuding of forests and eutrophication of waters caused by acid rain ami the iru. rvasim; ^htoud of smog smothering more and more of the world's atse: a^ evidence that the day of reckoning is approaching. They see the environment as a helpless pawn in the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Usurpation of natural resources by the powerful and a desire to maintain them by the weak, they claim, has turned the environment into a ^ battleground and the ultimate loser in this struggle.

There are those, of course, who just as emphatically point with pride to the great strides that have been made in alleviating human suffering and promoting human welfare in the areas of agriculture, medicine, and even design technology. If there is a problem, they claim, human ingenuity will solve it. To them:

There is no energy shortage, only an extraction problem

There is no population problem, only an uneven distribution of the species There is no toxic waste problem, only a few bugs to be worked out of the transportation and storage mechanisms.

Obviously, the jury is still out with respect to who is right in this debate. It is possible that technology will be made available to alleviate some of the pressure that humans are placing on the earth's resources. It is also possible that the destructive behavior of humans will change sufficiently to reverse the trend in environmental degradation. One thing for certain is that the debate is heating up. The convening of the United Nations Earth Summit in June 1992 in Rio de Janiero is ample evidence that more people are becoming aware of the situation. Accompanying this recent heightened concern with human influences on the environment has been a resurgence of interest in the effect of the environment on human functioning. A multitude of biological, psychological, and social horrors have been augured given continued environmental degradation and unchecked population growth. Information is beginning to amass regarding the physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects of unwanted noise, air pollution, excessive temperatures, barometric pressure, building design, among other environmental factors. Short-term effects are being studied as well as long-term accumulative effects. Additionally, a growing literature suggests that some environmental conditions produce detrimental aftereffects in those exposed to them (i.e., the effects do not manifest themselves immediately, but rather show up much later after their causes have been removed). These, too, are being studied with renewed interest. Similarly, the potential to alter values, attitudes, and behavior vis-a-vis the environment is being explored.

The recent emergence of environmental psychology as a discipline signals a growing discontent with mere speculation and uninformed rhetoric (often emotional) and reflects the efforts of social, behavioral, and biological scientists (along with their colleagues in the design and engineering professions) to gain data- based answers to questions regarding human/environment interactions. This increased concern, coupled with increased research, has led to a substantiation of some popular opinions and to a refutation of others. This book provides an introduction to what is currently known regarding person-environment relationships and invites the reader to think about, add to, and act upon this information.

DEFINITION OF ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY Environmental psychology constitutes an area of inquiry that is rooted in numerous disciplines. Biologists, geologists, psychologists, lawyers, geographers, economists, sociologists, chemists, physicists, historians, philosophers, and all of their sub disciplines, and all of their engineering brethren share an interest in understanding the complex, often delicate, set of relationships between humans and their environments.

While this understanding is sought for its own sake the goal of basic research to say is that most "scientists get involved in the environmental concerns, Its proponents, therefore, tend to focus on socially relevant problems arid to emphasize practical application of knowledge. They emphasize the interrelationship of environment and behavior, the physical environment as influencing people's behavior and people as actively and sometimes passively, influencing the environment.

Because of this multiplicity of origins, and because of its relative youth as a discipline, environmental psychology is still evolving. Any definition of the field must therefore reflect its breadth and its changing nature, must include an acknowledgement of its strong pull to application (while being careful not to dismiss the need for basic research), and must stress the reciprocal relationship of organisms to their environments.

Environmental psychology could, therefore, be defined as a behavioral science that investigates, with an eye toward enhancing, the interrelationships between the physical environment and human behavior.

Even though this definition includes the concerns expressed above, it does not capture the richness of thinking of those involved in the discipline, nor does it reveal the desire of its partisans to develop systemic and inter-systemic models of understanding. For example environmental psychologists are interested in the various physiological, psychological and behavioral processes by which people respond to the complexities of their environment. Researchers in the field, therefore investigate questions that involve physiological content (e.g., changes in heart rate, endocrine functioning, galvanic skin response, mortality)",