'Environmental Psychology is broad and deep'

Ella Rhodes spoke to the first Co-Chairs of the new British Psychological Society Environmental Psychology Section – Lecturer in Environmental Psychology Dr Melissa Marselle (University of Surrey) and Associate Professor and lead of the Technology Acceptance Research Group for Energy Technologies Dr Chris Jones (University of Portsmouth).

Could you tell me how you got involved in Environmental Psychology?

MM: I moved to the UK from the US to do a master's in environmental psychology here at Surrey in 2003. I then worked as a researcher for six years on various research projects related to human-environment interaction, including a project which aimed to understand people's evacuation from the World Trade Center on 11 September. I later did my PhD in Environmental Psychology with Katherine Irvine at De Montfort University.

Psychology has always clicked for me, and particularly environmental psychology. This area involves studying the reciprocal relationships people share with natural and built environments – understanding how people perceive and experience environments, their influence on behaviour and wellbeing and how we affect the environments around us.

When I was a teenager I found that spending time in the woodland of Oregon, where I grew up, really helped me cope with all the angst and difficulties of being a teenager, the trees were a lot bigger than me and they could give me a sense of perspective on my problems. I wanted to investigate what that was psychologically, to understand why spending time in nature helped me cope. That led me to the two theories of restorative environments from environmental psychology, Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Recovery Theory, and they gave me a psychological theoretical base to what I was experiencing.

I research the psychological benefits of contact with nature, specifically which types and qualities of nature are most beneficial – do you need to go into woodland or would a park or your back garden be just as good? We're in a climate and biodiversity crisis, so a lot of my research is about the importance of biodiverse nature for our health and wellbeing.

CJ: After my psychology undergraduate at the University of Birmingham I hot-footed it to Sheffield where I did a master's and then a PhD. My PhD was in social psychology looking at how people form attitudes on the basis of their experience in unfamiliar environments – little did I know that that was my first step into Environmental Psychology.

At the end of my PhD, my then-supervisor Professor Dick Eiser secured some grant funding, along with Professor Nick Pidgeon at Cardiff University and a bunch of others, and that was looking at risk perception in the context of climate change and energy choices. My father worked in the energy industry all his career so I'd grown up with this kind of knowledge of the energy industry, but he tackled things from quite an engineering perspective, and so I saw my role as bringing in the more social science perspective on these issues. I wanted to advocate for more inclusive decision-making and understanding how different people would be affected by the decisions that were happening with regards to how we would power society, in the context of a decarbonising agenda.

From there I started really developing my interest in pro-environmental behaviour and technology acceptance – looking at energy technologies in particular and people's perceptions of these technologies. Now I lead The Technology Acceptance Research Group for Energy Technologies (TARG:ET) at the University of Portsmouth. My research interests focus principally upon social acceptance and social perspectives on different energy technologies and particularly very innovative things like fusion.

Could you tell me how you got involved with the Environmental Psychology Section?

CJ: A bunch of my PhD students and postdocs at Sheffield, when I was there as a lecturer, noticed that there wasn't a presence within the BPS frameworks for environmental psychology. In the absence of that they started up the British Environmental Psychology Society, BrEPS, which is still going today. That was an initial thing that made me think we could really use a Section at the BPS.

It's strange that this very well-established area of psychology wasn't represented within BPS frameworks. Environmental Psychology has a longer history than most people give it credit for – environmental psychologists have been active in the UK since the 50s. I was fortunate enough at Sheffield to mix with one of the pioneers in this area, Professor Chris Spencer, and he helped to form my early thinking around Environmental Psychology.

In 2017, I petitioned the BPS for the creation of a Section, but I was told they were reorganising structures and not creating new networks at the time.

A few years later we re-approached the BPS, but were met with the mis-perception that environmental psychology is climate psychology, and that's all it is. We were told because climate change transcends all of the different BPS Sections, so it should be considered by all of them. We had to work quite hard to illustrate that, although Environmental Psychology does cover climate change, it also includes broader areas.

Climate change is an important and key part of what we are focused on – it is the pressing issue of our time. But Environmental Psychology is much broader than that. It's much deeper than that, and it interfaces with so many different areas that you wouldn't expect. It can include the restorative benefits of nature, as Melissa mentioned, the relationships between built environment design and positive or negative behaviours, workplace or school interior design – how do we create spaces which facilitate productivity?

MM: I'd also add things like hospital design – how do we improve wayfinding inside a hospital? We had that Sycamore Gap tree that was felled last year and people were angry and sad – Environmental Psychology can help us understand why we have that emotional response. I worked with Greater Manchester Police to design out crime in Manchester City Centre – thinking about what is it in the public realm that can lead to crime and how we can prevent that.

This wasn't the first time that members have attempted to start an environmental section – well-regarded environmental psychologists had attempted and failed. The stars aligned for us in this moment of time.

I'm a member of the BPS Climate and Environment Action Coordinating Group which was set up for psychologically-informed climate and environment work. As a coordinating group, we were there to coordinate activities of the other BPS networks, Divisions and Sections… I kept saying that without an Environmental Psychology Section in the BPS, we'd miss all the work that environmental psychologists do.

Can you tell me about some of your hopes for the section?

CJ: The response so far has been really positive, I think people have felt it was an obvious hole in the BPS and they're pleased that it's plugged now. We've had a lot of buy-in not just from environmental psychologists but also other sections who are interested in environmental psychology or in the interfaces between environment and other areas. One of the obvious ones is health – there's a really important interface between environmental change and health. We've also got links with clinical psychology, social psychology, and occupational psychology.

We have spoken to the branches and that immediately led to a number of opportunities for working with branches to support some of the work they're doing which has the environment as a focus. There's a clear appetite for what we do, and I think our intent is to try and encourage and promote UK Environmental Psychology, try and unite what is a large, fairly dissipated community. We also hope to offer networking and dissemination activities, career development opportunities and make sure that we're representing UK Environmental Psychology both nationally and internationally.

MM: There is a significant process of hurdles to get through to start a new Section – we needed 20 signatures on our proposal to take to Senate and we got 50; then we needed at least 1 per cent of the members, 640, to vote to support the Section and we got more than double that; then we needed 50 BPS members to be members of the section, and we have over 100. The numbers speak for themselves, and show the support within our society. 

Find out more about the Environmental Psychology Section.

See a collection of articles and interviews from The Psychologist around climate and the environment.