Albert Mehrabian

Public Places and Private Spaces is an environmental psychology book for a general audience. It is a semi-academic mix of studies and the author's commentary.

Mehrabian applies the insights of environmental psychology to the personal environment (your body), then to homes, work, public environments, and cities/suburbs. The organization really emphasizes the applicability of environmental psychology to many different aspects of life.

Mehrabian also presents basic useful concepts. Mehrabian classifies environments using three dimensions: arousal/non-arousal, pleasure/displeasure, and dominance/submissiveness. The emotional effect of an environment can be predicted based on its characterization. For example, a pleasant, moderately arousing environment that makes one feel dominant (such as a familiar and busy city block) will generally cause approach behavior. However, if one's arousal level increases (say by wandering into an unfamiliar area), the pleasure decreases (perhaps by a shift in weather), or one feels less dominant (maybe the crosswalk signals have bad timing) the nearly identical environment may cause avoidance behavior or hostility.

But not everyone reacts the same way even to the same environment. One way to categorize a person's general reaction to an environment is to classify them as a screener or a non-screener. A screener tends to experience a reduced environmental load by filtering out much of the environmental input. A non-screeners experience higher environmental load because they filter less input. Non-screeners tend to be more sensitive to both the positive and negative aspects of their environment. These two categories describe a spectrum; neither extreme screeners nor extreme non-screeners get along very well in the real world.

Finally, I want to point out that this book shows its age in amusing ways. The book was written in the mid 1970's, and it sometimes shows. The author really likes the idea of using colored lights to change the properties of a room. He will sometimes give examples that talk about a well to do person making $25,000 a year. Things like this make me giggle.… (mere)