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      Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance

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          Abstract

          In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations.

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            The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health.

            Scholars spanning a variety of disciplines have studied the ways in which contact with natural environments may impact human well-being. We review the effects of such nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, synthesizing work from environmental psychology, urban planning, the medical literature, and landscape aesthetics. We provide an overview of the prevailing explanatory theories of these effects, the ways in which exposure to nature has been considered, and the role that individuals' preferences for nature may play in the impact of the environment on psychological functioning. Drawing from the highly productive but disparate programs of research in this area, we conclude by proposing a system of categorization for different types of nature experience. We also outline key questions for future work, including further inquiry into which elements of the natural environment may have impacts on cognitive function and mental health; what the most effective type, duration, and frequency of contact may be; and what the possible neural mechanisms are that could be responsible for the documented effects. © 2012 New York Academy of Sciences.
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              What are the Benefits of Interacting with Nature?

              There is mounting empirical evidence that interacting with nature delivers measurable benefits to people. Reviews of this topic have generally focused on a specific type of benefit, been limited to a single discipline, or covered the benefits delivered from a particular type of interaction. Here we construct novel typologies of the settings, interactions and potential benefits of people-nature experiences, and use these to organise an assessment of the benefits of interacting with nature. We discover that evidence for the benefits of interacting with nature is geographically biased towards high latitudes and Western societies, potentially contributing to a focus on certain types of settings and benefits. Social scientists have been the most active researchers in this field. Contributions from ecologists are few in number, perhaps hindering the identification of key ecological features of the natural environment that deliver human benefits. Although many types of benefits have been studied, benefits to physical health, cognitive performance and psychological well-being have received much more attention than the social or spiritual benefits of interacting with nature, despite the potential for important consequences arising from the latter. The evidence for most benefits is correlational, and although there are several experimental studies, little as yet is known about the mechanisms that are important for delivering these benefits. For example, we do not know which characteristics of natural settings (e.g., biodiversity, level of disturbance, proximity, accessibility) are most important for triggering a beneficial interaction, and how these characteristics vary in importance among cultures, geographic regions and socio-economic groups. These are key directions for future research if we are to design landscapes that promote high quality interactions between people and nature in a rapidly urbanising world.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                03 May 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 571
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Faculty of Sciences, Universidad de Chile Santiago, Chile
                [2] 2IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind, and Society, University of the Basque Country Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
                Author notes

                Edited by: Bill Mace, Trinity College, USA

                Reviewed by: Cristina Meini, Universitá degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro”, Italy; Harry Heft, Denison University, USA

                *Correspondence: Laura Menatti, laurettamenatti@ 123456yahoo.it

                This article was submitted to Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00571
                4853392
                27199808
                dedc34ff-eb0b-4a91-b1c4-9340bd8d0db7
                Copyright © 2016 Menatti and Casado da Rocha.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 18 January 2016
                : 06 April 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 149, Pages: 17, Words: 0
                Funding
                Funded by: Eusko Jaurlaritza 10.13039/501100003086
                Award ID: IT590-13
                Funded by: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad 10.13039/501100003329
                Award ID: FFI2014-52173-P
                Categories
                Psychology
                Hypothesis and Theory

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                affordance,agency,ecological psychology,health,landscape,naturalistic aesthetics,well-being,perception

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