Environmental psychology and well-being : from a generic relationship to a specific theoretical framework

Current researches on subjective well-being often neglect some contributions, belonging to other areas of psychology, about the outcomes of the positive bonds to places. The literature on Environmental Psychology (Low and Altman, 1992; Kaplan and Kaplan, 2003; Korpela et al., 2008), shows that the place attachment and the mere exposure to natural landscapes have remarkable positive effects on individuals, such as the promotion of cognitive (Wells, 2000) and emotional development, of individual health and trauma resilience (Ulrich, 1984), the optimal functioning of cognitive processes (Kaplan and Talbot, 1983). However, the main theoretical frameworks in this field (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Ulrich, 1984) tend to explain the environment-well being relationship as an automatic regulation system, within which people unwittingly regain normal levels of cognitive functioning after a period of mental fatigue. We hypothesize that, besides this regulation process, the person-environment relation gives rise to generative processes that promotes groundbreaking behaviours based on intrinsic motivations (Ryan and Deci, 1985; 1999; 2000). We also argue that the person environment relation may generate some flourishing effects (Keyes, 2002; Fredrikson, 1998; 2005) on subjective skills. Those effects may also influence several cognitive processes (perception, problem-solving, memory, explanatory stiles), triggering different information-processing styles (e.g., Bless and Fiedler, 2006). Within this framework, places and their positive features may be seen as artefacts able to promote flow (Csikszentmihaly, 1975; 1980; 1997) and trascendence experiences (Gallagher, 1993; Williams and Harvey, 2001). As a consequence, we suggest that the main theoretical model of the environment-well being relationship (Attention Restoration Theory, Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995), should be integrated with the optimal experience model (Csikszentmihaly, 1980; 1990) in order to create a more comprehensive framework on the person-environment system. The results of the present study, based on the theorical and methodological constructs of SWB (Diener, 1984) and Place Attachment, and conducted on a sample of European young students, support our hypothesis.