Environmental psychology: Future directions

This chapter explores future directions for Environmental Psychology in five distinct areas. For each area, three instances are identified that allow us to understand, respectively, different frameworks, processes, types of evidence, outcomes, and channels. Emerging research directions and existing gaps in each area are highlighted with three instances, by also stressing those instances’ complementarity in helping to address each area. The five areas (with their respective three instances) are 1) meta-theoretical frameworks bound to shape the future of the field (i.e., the Exposome scientific conceptualization, the One Health paradigm by the WHO, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the UN); 2) person-place processes, by means of which the environment impacts people (i.e., Mitigation, Restoration, and Generativity); 3) methodology for psychological evidence, envisaging the integration of such methodologies in the future (i.e., neural and psychophysiological, self-report, and behavioral data); 4) main classes of psychological outcomes of environment exposure (i.e., health, well-being, and sustainability); and finally, 5) types of channels for human experience of the environment (i.e., the physical, digital, and phygital one).