The diverse literature related to “place” is discussed in the context of several psychological frameworks to highlight connections to conservation psychology research and practice. The study of the human relationship to place is first cross-cut by distinctions between built versus natural places, explanatory versus normative stances, and humanistic versus scientific approaches. Several typographies are then provided as ways to organize some of the psychological research related to place. Place perception and cognition provide insights into mental and collective representations of place. Affective or emotional constructs, such as place attachment and dependence, offer ways to consider the strong bonds people form with places, which can be significant factors in land management. Place identity research describes how a person may have a sense of belonging in a place, and how this may vary with background variables. Finally, development of a sense of place is examined for both children and adults. Lessons for mental health, education, and communication, and public involvement in adaptive ecosystem management are suggested, and illustrated by experiences in the Great Lakes region.

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The senses considered as perceptual systems

Place and the Promise of Conservation Psychology

This paper addresses the methodological gap that impedes the collection of empirical data on subjective experience. It describes a new family of methods for social science research (Subjective Evid...

/pdf/how-can-we-capture-the-subject-s-perspective-an-evidence-hqfegv8pul.pdf

How can we capture the subject’s perspective? An evidence-based approach for the social scientist

Students of the neural basis of cognition might weil take as their dictum the first phrase in the gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the word.” In this chapter, we beg to differ and side instead with Goethe’s Faust who, not satisfied with the accuracy of the biblical statement, proposed a rather different solution: “Im Anfang war die Tat”—“In the beginning was the act.”1 Certainly, if there is a lesson to be learned from the fie1d of neuroembryology, it is that motility precedes reactivity; there is a chronological primacy of the motor over the sensory. 2 Although one of our main premises is that any distinction between sensory and motor is an artificiaI one (cf. Kelso, 1979), this brief sojoum into developmental embryology affords what we take to be a main contrast between the topic of concem in this chapter—the control and coordination of movement—and the subject matter of the rest of this book.

A Dynamical Basis for Action Systems

Clapping is a little‐studied human activity that may be viewed either as a form of communicative group behavior (applause) or as an individual sound‐generating activity involving two ‘‘articulators’’—the hands. The latter aspect was explored in this pilot study by means of acoustical analyses and perceptual experiments. Principal components analysis of 20 subjects’ average clap spectra yielded several dimensions of interindividual variation that were related to observed hand configuration. This relationship emerged even more clearly in a similar analysis of a single clapper’s deliberately varied productions. In perception experiments, subjects proved sensitive to spectral properties of claps: For a single clapper, at least, listeners were able to judge hand configuration with good accuracy. Besides providing some general information on individual variations in clapping, the present results support the general hypothesis that sound emanating from a natural source informs listeners about the changing states of the source mechanism.

The senses considered as perceptual systems

Citations

Place and the Promise of Conservation Psychology

How can we capture the subject’s perspective? An evidence-based approach for the social scientist

A Dynamical Basis for Action Systems

The sound of two hands clapping: an exploratory study.

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