Whereas previous psychological research has examined the benefits of nature from a stress-reduction and attention-restoration perspective, the current studies focus on what possibilities for action are evoked by natural versus built environments. After a study pilot-testing a novel self-administration procedure for soliciting what individuals feel they "could do" in a built or natural outdoor site after walking in it, two studies were conducted to test quantitative differences in the action possibilities (i.e., affordances) that walkers detected when moving through a built or a natural site. A naturalistic study involved community participants who were recruited on-site at one of 12 built or natural sites within the same region of a community. A field experiment involved college students randomly assigned to walk one of four sites (forest or meadow, or one of two areas within the downtown of a small town). No reliable differences were detected in number of responses to the prompt "I could ..." completed by participants as a function of natural versus built sites. However, in the field experiment, participants in built rather than natural sites generated more verb and social content, and more total words. In the experiment, participants who walked natural sites had more improvement in positive affect than those who walked built sites.

Objects are commonly described based on their relations to other objects (e.g., associations, semantic similarity, etc.) or their physical features (e.g., birds have wings, feathers, etc.). However, objects can also be described in terms of their actionable properties (i.e., affordances), which reflect interactive relations between actors and objects. While several normed datasets have been developed to categorize various aspects of meaning (e.g., semantic features, cue-target associations, etc.), to date, norms for affordances have not been generated. We address this limitation by developing a set of affordance norms for 2825 concrete nouns. Using an open-response format, we computed affordance strength (AFS; i.e., the probability of an item eliciting a particular action response), affordance proportion (AFP; i.e., the proportion of participants who provided a specific action response), and affordance set size (AFSS; i.e., the total number of unique action responses) for each item. Because our stimuli overlapped with Pexman et al.'s, Behavior Research Methods, 51, 453-466, (2019) body-object interaction norms (BOI), we tested whether AFS, AFP, and AFSS were related to BOI, as objects with more perceived action properties may be viewed as being more interactive. Additionally, we tested the relationship between AFS and AFP and two separate measures of relatedness: cosine similarity (Buchanan et al., Behavior Research Methods, 51, 1849-1863, 2019a, Behavior Research Methods, 51, 1878-1888, 2019b) and forward associative strength (Nelson et al., Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 402-407, 2004). All analyses, however, revealed weak relationships between affordance measures and existing semantic norms, suggesting that affordance properties reflect a separate construct.

One of Harry Heft's most significant contributions to science is his role in humanizing ecological psychology, bringing a strongly social and developmental perspective to perception-action. By focusing most centrally on human "ways of living," he tackles the considerable challenge of bringing a socio-historical perspective to ecological psychology's understanding of affordances and environments embedded within cultures. In doing so, he has grappled with some significant challenges that social psychology and developmental psychology face. Nevertheless, throughout his work, he remains consistent with the meta-theoretical commitments of ecological psychology – no small task in the face of social psychology's use of similar concepts but disinterest in such commitments. This chapter examines Heft's influence in environmental psychology, which includes bringing the concept of affordances into environmental description and offering critical perspectives on trending phenomena, such as restorative environments. Heft's most notable contributions for psychology is of particular focus: the elaboration of a theoretical approach to understanding socially constituted places, stemming from Roger Barker's concept of behavior settings. Throughout this chapter, the authors discuss research they have done in the area of social affordances, affordances of indoor spaces, and restorative environments, much of this inspired by Heft's ideas.

Crash risk depends on several factors, driver factors being the most significant of all. Previous studies have tended to use roadway and driver demographic information to explain crash risk, overlooking driver psychological characteristics, which are also important for crash risk estimation. Crash data from police reports are available only for reportable crashes and do not detail driver characteristics or comparable information on driving activities. Naturalistic driving studies (NDSs) offer unique opportunities to obtain information about driver attributes, behavior, or other precrash factors for predicting crash occurrence. This study estimated NDS event-oriented models to evaluate the interaction between driver attributes and roadway environmental factors for predicting safety critical events. A latent class clustering approach was used to uncover categories of drivers by psychological, perceptual, and cognitive characteristics, and by driving experience. The results revealed four driver types: risk-taker, careful-impaired, careful-unimpaired, and distractible. These types were incorporated in mixed-effects binary logistic models, with roadway, traffic, and environmental variables to estimate and predict crash risk. The models that included driver factors more successfully predicted crash risk than those without. Risk-takers showed the highest probability of being in crashes. However, careful-impaired drivers—those whose impairments made it difficult to identify the location of another vehicle, visualize missing information, who had difficulties with visual–spatial perception and executive functioning—posed a higher crash risk in roadway conditions such as snow, lack of lane markings, and certain traffic operating conditions. The results point to novel avenues for educational and behavioral interventions to improve road safety.

Most research on interpersonal coordination has employed the wrist-pendulum paradigm to demonstrate that visual information is sufficient to couple the rhythmic movements of co-actors (Schmidt & Turvey, 1994, Schmidt & O'Brien, 1997; Schmidt, Bienvenu, Fitzpatrick & Amazeen, 1998). Despite the clarity of this work, questions about the ecological validity of this methodology for the study of interpersonal coordination have been raised (Richardson, Marsh, & Schmidt, 2005). As a result, a new methodology was developed which employs a more commonplace, everyday task; namely, having individuals sit side-by-side in rocking chairs. Two experiments reported here examined the validity of this paradigm for the study of interpersonal coordination.

The causal relationship of interpersonal liking affecting interpersonal synchrony is inconsistently documented. This study tests whether (a) interpersonal liking increases both behavioural and perceived synchrony and (b) people will synchronise with an agreeable partner over a competing musical stimulus. We had college students ( N = 25) shake an egg-shaker with an agreeable or disagreeable confederate without music, with music, and with specific instruction to synchronise. Participants reported liking the agreeable confederate more than the disagreeable confederate and rated their relationship more positively; however, both behavioural and perceived synchrony were unaffected by the agreeableness of the confederate. Thus, we failed to replicate previous findings in an auditory only context. Furthermore, participants who believed they were more synchronised with the confederate liked the confederate more and felt more like a team, but the degree of behavioural synchrony was unrelated to these social perceptions. Perception of synchrony appears to be more important for social bonding than behavioural synchrony.

An affordance is an opportunity for action that is scaled to the capabilities of an organism. For example, whether or not an object is graspable scales to an individual's hand size (Chan, Carello, & Turvey, 1990). Recent research has extended the framework of intrinsic or body-scaled perception to interpersonal situations as well. The transition from one-hand (1H) to two-hand (2H), and two-hand (2H) to two-person (2P) grasping behavior is also scaled intrinsically (Richardson, Marsh, & Baron, 2005). The present study controls for effector size (e.g., hand-span or arm-span) in order to focus on the particular intrinsic scaling of the transition points as individuals were instructed to grasp and move wooden planks of various lengths either alone, or together with another individual.

During the COVID-19 stay-at-home period there were observed increases in both the percentage of cars engaged in extreme speeding, and the percentage of cars traveling below the speed limit. These changes have been attributed to unusually low traffic volume during the stay-at-home period. We develop a novel theoretical account, based on existing empirical research, of perceptual and psychological processes that may account for changes in speeding behavior under low traffic volume conditions. These include impaired ability to accurately perceive and control speed due to change in visual information, decreased salience of certain norms about socially appropriate speeds, lower perceived risk of speeding, and increased boredom leading to risk-taking behaviors. Further, we consider that individual attitude functions may account for the observed split in speeding behavior.

Joint action can take many forms: whereas rowers synchronise their movements, dancers often engage in closely coordinated complementary action. Even in martial arts, fighters closely coordinate their movements in an effort to understand and control their opponent’s movements. In joint actions such as these, the possibilities for action require multiple agents to partake in the social system, as the joint action cannot be enacted by an individual alone. Although most people have an intuitive understanding of what it means to experience having an impact on one’s environment, this paper is particularly concerned with providing a formal understanding of agency in a social system where control within the social system is distributed over multiple agents. The central question is: how do agents experience social unity in situations in which the individual actions cannot be understood separately from the behaviour of the system as a whole? In this paper, we combine insights from social and ecological psychology and behavioural dynamics to propose a theoretical framework on how joint action affects the experience of agency and social unity. Using empirical examples from rowing, dance and martial arts, we discuss how determining the link between psychological states during coordination and accidental or intentional breakdowns (in cooperative failure or combative success, respectively) provides insights into fundamental debates about the nature of joint action (Butterfill, 2012; Gilbert, 1996; 2000; Marsh, Johnston, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009a; 2009b; Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2009a; 2009b).

Many contextual factors can influence evacuees' choice of egress route during an emergency. Anxiety caused by the emergency situation may lead to suboptimal choices, resulting in slower evacuation and greater risk of injury or death. The present pilot study tests the influence of hazard level (presence of visible fire and smoke) and information about an obstacle (delivered verbally or through signage) on evacuees' anxiety levels and choice of egress route in a virtual reality (VR) simulation of a fire evacuation with multiple possible exits. Physiological measures were recorded and used to validate the efficacy of VR in inducing anxiety germane to the situation of interest. Consistent with our expectations, providing information about the obstacle was shown to decrease total evacuation time. Contrary to our predictions, it did not significantly impact evacuees' choice of exit. Information also had a marginally significant effect on participants' self-reported anxiety. Providing more targeted information may further reduce anxiety and evacuation time. More generally, VR appears well-suited to assessing individual and psychological factors in evacuations.

Recent research indicates that individuals show diverse behavioral responses to social ostracism. The current studies evaluate how social motives following ostracism are reflected in preferences for physical environments that either facilitate (sociopetal) or inhibit (sociofugal) social interaction. Across three experiments, participants ostracized during a virtual interaction showed greater preference for sociofugal spaces when presented with room layouts. Importantly, participants' ratings of the space's social affordances predicted this effect, rather than participant's mood or impression of the space's novelty. Additionally, the effect was found to be particularly strong for individuals high in fear of negative evaluation. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that evaluations of physical settings are dependent on the fit between the social affordances of an environment and the immediate social motivations of the perceiver.

The current study examined whether exposure to sexually objectifying images in a potential romantic partner's virtual apartment affects discrepancies between people's perception of their own appearance (i.e., self-perceptions) and their perception of the body ideal that is considered desirable to a romantic partner (i.e., partner-ideals). Participants were 114 heterosexual undergraduate students (57 women and 57 men) from a northeastern U.S. university. The study used a 2 (Participant Gender) x 2 (Virtual Environment: Sexualized vs. Non-Sexualized) between-subjects design. We predicted that women exposed to sexually objectifying images in a virtual environment would report greater discrepancies between their self-perceptions and partner-ideals than men, which in turn would contribute to women's body consciousness. Findings support this hypothesis and show that perceived discrepancies account for the relationship between exposure to sexually objectifying images and body consciousness for women but not men. We also found gender asymmetries in objectification responses when each component of perceived discrepancies, i.e., self-perceptions versus perceptions of a romantic partner's body ideal, were examined separately. For men, exposure to muscular sexualized images was significantly associated with their self-perceptions but not their perceptions of the body size that is considered desirable to a romantic partner. For women, exposure to thin sexualized images was significantly associated with their perceptions that a romantic partner preferred a woman with a smaller body size. However, exposure to these images did not affect women's self-perceptions. Implications for gender asymmetries in objectification responses and perceived discrepancies that include a romantic partner's perceptions are discussed.