Boomsma Christine, Pahl Sabine, Andrade Jackie
School of Psychology, Plymouth University Plymouth, UK.
Front Psychol. 2016 Nov 17;7:1780. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01780. eCollection 2016.
Climate change and other long-term environmental issues are often perceived as abstract and difficult to imagine. The images a person associates with environmental change, i.e., a person's environmental mental images, can be influenced by the visual information they come across in the public domain. This paper reviews the literature on this topic across social, environmental, and cognitive psychology, and the wider social sciences; thereby responding to a call for more critical investigations into people's responses to visual information. By integrating the literature we come to a better understanding of the lack in vivid and concrete environmental mental imagery reported by the public, the link between environmental mental images and goals, and how affectively charged external images could help in making mental imagery less abstract. Preliminary research reports on the development of a new measure of environmental mental imagery and three tests of the relationship between environmental mental imagery, pro-environmental goals and behavior. Furthermore, the paper provides a program of research, drawing upon approaches from different disciplines, to set out the next steps needed to examine how and why we should encourage the public to imagine environmental change.
气候变化和其他长期环境问题常常被视为抽象且难以想象的。一个人将其与环境变化联系起来的意象，即一个人的环境心理意象，可能会受到他们在公共领域所接触到的视觉信息的影响。本文回顾了社会心理学、环境心理学、认知心理学以及更广泛的社会科学领域中关于这一主题的文献；从而回应了对人们对视觉信息的反应进行更批判性研究的呼吁。通过整合这些文献，我们能更好地理解公众所报告的生动具体的环境心理意象的缺失、环境心理意象与目标之间的联系，以及充满情感的外部意象如何有助于使心理意象不那么抽象。初步研究报告了一种新的环境心理意象测量方法以及三项关于环境心理意象、环保目标与行为之间关系的测试。此外，本文提供了一个研究计划，借鉴不同学科的方法，阐述了审视我们应如何以及为何鼓励公众想象环境变化所需的后续步骤。
