ABSTRACT
An approach to environmental psychophysiology was described in a chapter by Parsons and Hartig (2000). The topics emphasized by them for study in this area are environmental stress, restorative environments, and topographic cognition. Their preferred definition of environmental psychophysiology concerns transactions between the organism and the environment and the resulting physiological response. Their approach is much broader than that taken in this chapter and is a welcome addition to the study of environmental/psychological influences on physiological activity. It must be pointed out that some of the information that they include under environmental stress was covered in earlier chapters on heart activity and blood pressure (chaps. 15 and 16) and in chapter 17 under physiological correlates of vigilance and workload. In fact, the emerging area of psychophysiology in ergonomics deals with improving the humanmachine environment by taking into account the physiological cost of performing work in different ways (see Yagi, Boucsein, & Yamada, 2001). The study of environmental effects on performance, and sometimes physiology, has a long history within the fields of human factors, engineering psychology, and ergonomics (see McCormick, 1957; Morgan, Cook, Chapanis, & Lund, 1963). There are precedents in the area of work physiology as seen in the research of Brouha (1960), who, as one example, carefully studied the effects on heart rate, and heart rate recovery, of working in temperatures ranging from 60°F to 100°F. The environmental agents covered here were first presented in an Appendix of the 1980 edition of this text (Andreassi, 1980) and the term “environmental psychophysiology” was coined in the 1995 edition (Andreassi, 1995) and presented in chapter 17.
