Investigating People's Emotional Experiences of Urban Environments through Virtual Reality

Carlos Hernandez Ramos

Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation

College: Hennings College of Science Mathematics and Technology

Major: BS.ENVIRSCI

Faculty Research Mentor: Feng Qi

Abstract:

Characteristics of the environment affect our psychological and general well-being. The mechanisms of the environment's psychological impacts on humans have been long studied, but many questions remain unanswered, such as how individuals’ sociocultural background, dispositions, and ways of relating to emotional experiences affect how they perceive different environments. We utilized Google Street View images to represent different environmental settings in urbanized communities in New Jersey and recruited participants to view the images with Virtual Reality. Each participant responded to a series of questionnaires on their sociocultural background, religion, mindfulness, and satisfaction with life, among others. They then recorded their perceptions of the environments and their psychological status before and after viewing the Google Street View images. Exploratory data analyses were conducted to investigate the association between environmental properties and psychological status. With the data collected, we also took a first look at how the patterns are affected by individuality factors. Our initial findings suggest that consistent relationships exist between people's psychological responses and environmental settings, especially with varying amounts of greenness. Individual factors did not show a significant impact on the relationships with limited data, but participants with higher satisfaction with life scores did not appear to be as affected by greenness in the environment as others.