The Personality and Emotion Profile of Landscapes: Towards a Psychology of Places
Any observer can attest to the existence of ‘local psychologies’: Certain geographic areas emanate liveliness and diversity, others solemnity and earnestness. Such local psychologies capture clusters of similar psychological characteristics. Philosophers and geographers have developed rich accounts of human-places interactions, yet psychological investigations have only recently started to emerge. This doctoral research examined the ways in which traits and states are associated with the broad physical environment in which they occur. In Chapter 1, I introduced geographical psychology as the methodological and theoretical framework which guided the present research programme. In the following two chapters, I investigated the personality and emotion profile of landscapes. In Chapter 2, I considered whether landscapes—a broad feature of the environment— is associated with regional variations in personality traits. A data-driven approach (N = 2,690,878) using satellite land cover data revealed meaningful associations between regional personality and landscapes. Shifting the focus to states, in Chapter 3 I showcased how landscapes have distinct emotion profiles (N = 15,225 judgements). Unsupervised clustering algorithms uncovered that a soft natural-artificial dichotomy is representative of landscapes’ emotion profile. Next, two emotions—nostalgia and boredom—were the focus of an in-depth investigation due to their putative link to broad features of the environment. In Chapter 4, I explored place nostalgia—the sentimental longing or wistful affection for certain physical locations across three online studies (N = 1,000). Nostalgic (vs. ordinary) places were predominantly located in blue and urban landscapes. Notably, reminiscing about nostalgic places increased social-connectedness, meaning in life, self-continuity, authenticity, and self-esteem. In Chapter 5, I illustrated how nostalgia is meaningfully associated with ambient temperature by examining cross-national (12 countries, N = 1,755) and within-national variations in regional nostalgia (N = 84,799 tweets). In Chapter 6, regional boredom (N = 76,250 tweets) was negatively associated with natural landscapes and positively associated with artificial landscapes. I concluded the dissertation with Chapter 7, where I illustrated how these findings can be effectively incorporated into existing geographical psychology frameworks and can guide future nature-based interventions.
emotion, geographical psychology, landscape, personality, physical environment
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