Directions in environmental preference research: time, categories and the real world

Abstract

Environmental preference research has constituted, in the last 20 years, one of the most active fields in the general scope of environmental psychology studies. Such research have fundamentally been promoted by governments, in the most conuntries, in order to manage the so-called scenic” resources (valued landscapes which are necessary to preserve or improve). The principal aim pursued in this papper is to present a general view about the foremost questions which characterize this active study field. Initially, state of art of the environmental psychology in The Netherlands has been, briefly, introduced and a definition of this discipline is offered. Subsequently, three lines of investigation in invironmental preference have been pointed out which are, according to the author, examples of scientific questions that are directly relevant for theoretical and applied progress in the mentioned discipline:a) the influence of time on preference for environments; b) the different theoretical views (categories); c) the relationships between objective characteristics and psychological subjective judgements of landscapes (the real world).