Evoked pleasure and approach-avoidance in response to pollution

Abstract

From year-to-year, environment is becoming one of the major concerns of human societies. Few studies have investigated the biological processes involved in environmental scene perception. Here, we initiate a line of research by beginning to study emotional processes involved in this perception. Our results demonstrate a clear distinction between "Clean" and "Polluted" environments according to the pleasure and approach desire ratings they induced. Moreover, women expressed higher pleasure in the "Clean" condition, as did older participants. Finally, rural scenes induced higher pleasure in participants than urban ones.

Postural Correlates of Pollution Perception

“…Our subjective ratings confirmed that polluted scenes evoked significantly higher displeasure and withdrawal. These results are in accordance with those of a previous study [ 17 ] which reported significantly higher pleasure and approach desire in response to the perception of clean scenes as compared to polluted ones. These results validate the selection of the stimuli in this preliminary study, which were kept for further studies (i.e., the present study), with the polluted stimuli inducing the highest displeasure ratings and avoidance desire ratings.…”

“…This project is important for understanding the incongruity between global social understanding that environmental pollution requires a behavioral change and the incapacity of long-term, significant change in individual behavior. To this aim, after having explored the subjective feelings evoked by clean or polluted environmental scenes [ 17 ], we wanted to explore the peripheral nervous side of the perception of such scenes and, more particularly, the motor, posturographic, and physiological correlates of their perception.…”

“…Twenty-two visual stimuli representing polluted environmental scenes (eleven images) or clean environmental scenes (eleven images) for each condition (active viewing, passive viewing) were extracted from a recently published database [ 17 ]. Scenes evoking average pleasure as well as average approach desire statistically greater than 6 were chosen for the “clean” condition, and those evoking average pleasure as well as average approach desire statistically less than 4 were chosen for the “polluted” condition.…”

“…Participants’ subjective reactions were collected on the same dimensions as those tested for the original image base [ 17 ]. The forty-four visual stimuli of the two conditions (“clean” and “polluted”) were presented to the participants using E-Prime 2 software (Psychology Software Tools, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, USA).…”

“…Shedding light on the emotional dimension of landscape perception, the preference for natural overt human-influenced environments has been reported in different cultures [ 14 ] and at a psychophysiological level [ 15 , 16 ]. In a previous study [ 17 ], we explored the subjective feelings (displeasure/pleasure and approach/avoidance) recorded in response to polluted and clean scenes. This research sheds light on the importance of the emotional processing of polluted environmental scenes to construct a global visual experience of pollution and to guide relevant behavior toward these scenes.…”