Adjustment to Geographical Space and Psychological Well-Being

Abstract

The social dimension in environmental psychology has yet to be properly defined; it appears indistinctly related to a social framework (of social relationships) and to a cultural one (of cultural differences in the relationships between signifiers and signified), when it is not reduced to different individual experiences based on different sets of shared material and economic conditions. This chapter discusses the role granted to the social dimension in the analysis of the person/environment relationship with a view towards reconsidering the concept of well-being in environmental psychology. Based on what is arguably the most solid finding in the history of environmental psychology—the congruence between the individual and the environment—this chapter sets out to revisit the place accorded to the sociological dimension in environmental psychology using a tridimensional conceptual model of person/environment congruence. It will end by presenting some examples of research providing illustrations of this model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)