Transcription
Good morning, afternoon, or evening! Today we're talking some more about environmental stress. Our focus is on stress-inducing qualities of environments. What is it about an environment that makes it stressful?
As we do this, I want you to keep in mind a couple of things. And the first one has to do with cognitive appraisal and individual differences. So remember that this makes a difference in the perception of environmental stressors. Stress is a dynamic interaction between the person and the environment! For instance, some people are more sensitive to noise, some people more sensitive to crowding, some people sensitive to smells—you get the idea!
Now I also want you to keep in mind the concept of allostatic load and how the cumulative effect of multiple environmental stressors can affect people. And I want you to think about it too in terms of how some groups of people are exposed to more environmental stressors, more environments with stress-inducing qualities than are others. So, for instance, people that live in low-income urban environments are exposed to multiple environmental stressors on a daily basis. For example, they often live in substandard housing—you know, substandard from a building perspective—and there's research showing that that's associated with symptoms of stress, including anxiety and depression. Low-income urban residents are also more likely to be exposed to multiple environmental stressors ranging from noise, like transportation noise, poor air quality, crime, and interior crowding. And add to that, low-income people of color often face additional stress from racial microaggressions. Remember, microaggressions are everyday acts of bias and exclusion. And we know from research that microaggressions and expecting and experiencing prejudice and discrimination and microaggressions is stressful to people. It requires constant coping, so that's also interesting to think about from an allostatic load perspective.
So keep these things in mind as we talk about stress-inducing qualities of environments. What makes an environment stressful? I think you'll agree that one thing is how extreme that environment is as far as things like temperature and wind and confinement. Right? And it's probably not too hard for you to remember getting irritable when you were too hot or too cold or when it was extremely windy. Extreme environments task our coping abilities. They take a lot of adaptive energy as we try to maintain some sort of comfort level and accomplish our goals with this environmental obstacle. Now it's one thing to cope with a few extremely hot or cold or windy weeks, or days or weeks here and there; it's quite another thing to work day in and day out under extreme environmental conditions. And of course, that that is what is required by some jobs, you know. So think about people working in space, undersea, underground, or in polar regions, like astronauts, military personnel, and submarines or Arctic research crews. For those of you that recreate in extreme environments, like mountaineering at high altitudes, this part of our lecture also applies to that.
Environmental psychologists like Bell, Fisher, Brown, and Mann say extreme environments involve hostile environmental demands, danger and physical risk to self or others, restricted living or working conditions, and social demands that may include isolation from those outside the setting, and close confinement with those inside. The psychology of working in extreme environments is interesting and it's important because this type of work is done under high-demand stressful conditions where stress may make failure more likely and failure may have serious consequences. For example, when we talk about the potential effects of stress in extreme environments, there are psychological effects, there are social effects, and there are also effects of stress that lead to reduced performance.
So think about this for a second. For example, stress increases distraction and cognitive load, which can decrease performance, especially when a job requires multitasking or coordinating with other team members. Stress from extreme environments can increase fear and anxiety and physiological reactivity, which can also lead to error. Also, much of the work in extreme environments includes teamwork, and stress has social effects. It decreases pro-social behaviors like helping other people, and cooperating with other people, and your ability to coordinate with other team members. It increases interpersonal conflict. So with this in mind, you can see why research finds that adaptation to these extreme environments requires mental stability. It requires conscientiousness and it requires good teamwork skills, and by good teamwork skills, we mean things like a team's ability to solve problems together, to coordinate their efforts, to make decisions, and to resolve conflicts quickly while preserving goodwill towards one another.
As far as working in these extreme environments goes, environmental psychologists also agree it requires well-designed interior environments that provide adequate stimulation and reduce feelings of confinement, and and also environments that meet individuals' privacy needs and provide opportunities for recreation.
Now interestingly, NASA is planning a 2030 Mars mission with a crew of four to six astronauts who will go on a three-year journey in a small confined habitat. Psychologist researchers at NASA's HERA and NEMO analog settings are currently examining the effects of confined habitats under high-demand conditions on astronauts' cognition, their mental health, and their teamwork.
So environments with extreme elements are often experienced as stressful. So are environments that overload us with stimulation. Sometimes I go to the grocery store and halfway through I become overwhelmed by the stimulation. Too many products. Too many noises. Too many people. I leave some of my shopping undone, rush through that check-out and get home. I also find that living so long in SLO town, I find larger cities to be stressful. There's so much going on, from the number of people, to the traffic, the noise, the visual elements, the smells, to signs of income inequality. I get overloaded and stressed. So my point is that environments that overload us with stimuli are often experienced as stressful.
And you might be interested to know that this idea originates in some ways with Stanley Milgram. You might remember him from the Milgram obedience experiments, but he actually spent much of his life studying human behavior in cities. And his "overload theory of stress" postulates that stress occurs when too many inputs come too fast, and the adaptive response, according to Milgram—and this makes sense given our environmental perception lecture—the adaptive response is to selectively attend, paying attention only to those stimuli that are personally relevant to your goals. The famous stress researcher Sheldon Cohen also noted too that if a person is overloaded for too long then even small demands for additional attention will cause stress, and I'm sure you've experienced that before! Some theories of arousal also suggest that individuals possess an "optimum level of arousal." Now this varies from person to person what their optimum is, but environmental psychologist Joachim Wohlwill applied this to environmental stress and noted that it's not just too much stimulation that can produce stress, it's too little. So, in other words, it's not just about environments that overload us with stimulation; environments that underload us with stimuli can also be stressful, and it all depends on your personal "optimal" level of arousal. Interesting to think about. I think you'll agree, boredom can also be stressful in its own way.
I want to talk next about frustrating environments, and in environmental psychology there's a model called the "behavioral constraint model." And basically, the idea is that environments that block "goal-directed activity" or restrict our our movements are likely to be experienced as stressful. Frustrating environments are experienced as more stressful when the reason for the frustration appears arbitrary (there's no good reason for it). Also, it's more stressful if the frustration is unexpected and unpredictable. Another model, called "person-environment fit," points out that environments are also likely to create frustration and be experienced as as stressful when they don't fit our needs. And so this is also interesting to think about, this notion that a poor person-environment fit will cause stress. So, you know, the design of the environment can support or thwart our goal accomplishment. I want to point out too, that frustrating environments may increase the level of aggression in our societies because when people become frustrated, they may become aggressive. You might remember this from social psychology as the "frustration-aggression hypothesis." Just google "road rage," and that baby will pop up with a couple of examples from the last couple of days of road rage, you know, episodes of frustrated drivers going after other drivers. Road rage kills about 200 people a year in the United States. And of course, keep in mind, this is another example of that person-environment dynamic interaction and the role of individual differences because, for sure, personality factors like what we call "trait anger," which is a personality tendency to become angry at the slightest provocation, interacts with frustrating environmental conditions to create aggression.
Have you ever lived or worked in a place where you had no control over the temperature or the noise level of the indoor space and it was aggravating? That's the thing we're talking about next when we talk about low-control environments. So this is another stress-inducing environmental quality, the amount of control people in that environment have. This is associated with a hypothesis called the "loss of control hypothesis," and again, the idea is that environments in which we perceive we have very little control are often stressful. So not being able to modify the environment to suit you, not being able to control the temperature of your room, or your workspace, or exposure to an uncontrollable stressor like noise. Now you might remember that over time, low-control environments can result in what we call "learned helplessness." You know, we've talked about it before. It occurs when people give up and become passive because they've learned that their efforts make no difference. Remember that study that compared the children from the four noisy schools in the air corridor of LAX airport with similar students from non-noisy schools and remember how those children from the noisy schools were more likely to give up trying to solve a puzzle?
Now research in the real world, like the school study I just mentioned, but also nursing homes, hospitals, college dormitories, and homeless shelters, all find that physical illness, social withdrawal, depression, and passivity can occur when people are in low-control environments. So, for instance, in some research I did at a homeless shelter, perceptions of control in the shelter and perceptions of control over their homelessness, were related to depression and to giving up on finding a job and a place to live. Now research going back to the 1960s also demonstrates that the effects of stressors are reduced when people perceive that they have control over them, so increasing the amount of control in environments benefits psychological and physical health. And I want to mention some classic research from Langer and Rodin in 1976 and 1977 that illustrates this idea that designing environments that empower people, that give them more control, are good for people's health. Now this was a field experiment and they randomly assigned nursing home residents to either an experimental group or a no-treatment control group. And the experimental group was given a plant to tend and personal control over their living environment, like allowing them to rearrange the furniture, and more choices about how to spend their time. Meanwhile, the control group was simply told that the staff knew what was best for them and that staff would decide how to best create an environment that suited the resident's needs. Eighteen months later, people in the experimental group were more likely to be alive and they also were more likely to score well on measures of mood and also sociability (how social they were), in comparison to the no-treatment control group.
Finally, as far as stress-inducing environmental qualities go, I want to once again mention unpredictable stressors. This is a theme that you see throughout environmental psychology and the study of environmental stress. This is the notion that unpredictable stressors, especially uncontrollable, unpredictable stressors, are experienced as particularly stressful. And you might remember from our environmental perception lecture that unpredictable stimuli are harder to habituate to—it's harder to get used to them—and that makes them more stressful; they require more adaptive energy.
Finally, I want to remind you of the important role of environmental designers in reducing stress. I mean architects, landscape architects, traffic engineers, city and regional planners, should all consider environmental sources of stress as they're designing. Likewise, for control in helping environments. The leaders and managers of these helping environments should consider the important role of giving clients, patients, residents some personal control over their environments. That is good for health and reduces the likelihood of passivity and learned helplessness.
Well, that's it for now. Until next time, wishing you the best in managing, coping with, and avoiding sources of environmental stress.