ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes data and theory on the psychology of stimulation and discusses the implications of this material for environmental design, in terms of several important but unresolved issues. The child psychologists, personality psychologists and social psychologists with an environmentalist bias should have neglected the role of the physical environment in behavior is readily understandable. There has been growing interest among architects and other students of environmental phenomena in the question of whether or not complex, ambiguous, noisy, and otherwise stimulating urban environments are beneficial or harmful. A number of psychologists working in this area have advanced an optimal-level hypothesis, postulating an inverted-U shaped relationship between magnitude of stimulation along the dimensions considered above and the arousal value of, interest in, or preference for a given stimulus. The concept of adaptation-level itself brings up a further question: What are the long-range effects of exposure to a given environment featured by a particular level of intensity, complexity, and incongruity of stimulation?.
