ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 discusses people’s affective responses to their environments and emotional experiences of places. The chapter begins with a discussion of preference surfaces or mental maps of geographic locations as an important attributive component of cognitive mapping. It also looks at studies of people’s perceptions of natural hazards, as a major impetus for the behavioral approaches in geography. The chapter next discusses studies of “meanings” with the method of semantic differential and studies of affective appraisal of visual stimuli in the tradition of experimental aesthetics. Then the chapter discusses people’s affective responses to environmental scenes and considers evolutionary approaches to environmental preference, based on the concepts of prospects and refuges and information-based properties of coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery. The chapter finally looks at the feeling of place attachment and the typology of human values.
