User:Li oneill/sandbox

Person[edit]
The Person dimension addresses the question of, "who is attached?"

When examined individually, places often gain meaning because of personal experiences, life milestones, and occurrences of personal growth. With communities, however, places derive religious, historical, or other cultural meanings. Community behaviors contribute not only to place attachment experienced by citizens of that community as a group, but also to those citizens individually. For example, desires to preserve ecological or architectural characteristics of a place have a direct impact on the strength of place attachment felt by individuals, notably through self-pride and self-esteem. People experience stronger attachments to places that they can identify with or otherwise feel proud to be a part of.

Process[edit]
The process dimension answers the question “How does the attachment exist?” Similar to other concepts in social psychology, this dimension relies on the collective effects of affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects.

Affect[edit]
The most common emotions associated with people-place bonding are positive, such as happiness and love. Yi-Fu Tuan, a noteworthy human geographer and pioneer in place attachment research, coined the term topophilia to describe the love that people feel for particular places. Negative emotions and experiences are also capable of giving places significance; however, negative emotions are usually not associated with people-place bonding since place attachment represents individuals’ yearnings to replicate positive experiences and emotions.

Cognition[edit]
Cognition incorporates the knowledge, memories, and meanings that individuals or groups have associated with places of attachment. Specifically, these cognitive elements represent what makes specific places important enough for people-place bonding to develop. Environmental psychologists additionally use the term schema to describe how people organize their beliefs and knowledge in regards to places and has led some researchers to note familiarity as a central cognitive element in place attachment. This idea of familiarity has been used in explaining why people mark themselves as “city people” or why they develop preferences for certain types of homes. Researchers have coined a number of terms based on familiarity, including “settlement identity” and “generic place dependence.”

Behavior[edit]
Behavior is the physical manifestation of place attachment and can represent the cognitive and affective elements that an individual possesses in their person-place bonds. Proximity-maintaining behaviors have been noted as common behaviors among people who have attachment of place, similar to those who have interpersonal attachments. Many individuals unknowingly experience the effects of place attachment through homesickness and will carry out proximity-maintaining behaviors to satisfy their desires to relieve it by returning home or reinventing their current environments to match the characteristics of home. This reinvention of current environments has been coined as reconstruction of place and is a notable place attachment behavior. Reconstruction of place often occurs when communities are rebuilding after natural disasters or war. As counterintuitive as it may seem, trips and even pilgrimages away from places can enhance a person-place bond because individuals grow an increased appreciation for the places they have left behind, contributing to feelings of nostalgia that often accompany attachment and the memories that places evoke.

Place[edit]
The Place dimension addresses the question of, “what is attached?” and can be applied to any geographic type. Many researchers stress that place attachment relies on both physical and social aspects.

Social[edit]
There is debate among environmental psychologists that place attachment occurs due to the social relationships that exist within the realm of an individual's significant place rather than the physical characteristics of the place itself. Hidalgo and Hernández (2001) studied levels of attachment based on different dimensions and found that while social aspects were stronger than physical ones, both affected the overall person-place bond.

Physical[edit]
Natural and built environments can both be subjects of person-place bonds. The resources that these environments provide are the most tangible aspects that can induce attachment. These resources can lead to the development of place dependence. Place dependence negatively correlates with environmental press, which can be defined as the demands and stresses that an environment puts on people physically, interpersonally, or socially. Conversely, intangible aspects of environments can also promote attachment. In particular, the characteristics and symbolic representations that an individual associates with his or her perceptions of self are pivotal in the person-place bond.

Bibliography:
Low, S. M., & Altman, I. (1992). Place Attachment. In I. Altman & S. M. Low (Eds.), Place Attachment (pp. 1–12). Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4_1 [waiting for textbook to be delivered]

Bott, S., Cantrill, J. G., & Myers, O. E. (2003). Place and the Promise of Conservation Psychology. Human Ecology Review, 10(2), 13.

Lewicka, M. (2011). Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31(3), 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001

Smith, J. S. (2017). Explorations in Place Attachment. Milton, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utah/detail.action?docID=5143572 [digital version available through Marriott Library]

Stokols, D., and S.A. Shumaker. 1981. People in Places: A Transactional View of Settings. P. 441–448 in Harvey, D. (Ed.). Cognition, Social Behavior, and the Environment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 608 pp. [waiting to have delivered from Marriott Library]