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The Environmental Preference Questionnaire (EPQ) was developed to assess patterns of satisfaction and preference pertaining to various environmental settings; its focus is not so much on past experience as on current outlook. The 267 teenagers who completed the EPQ in this study also responded to questions relating to facets of self-esteem and reasons for selecting their favorite activities. The Nature and Suburbs scales of the EPQ provided complementary patterns of esteem and motivation dimensions; the interaction of environmental settings and various kinds of contacts with peers and friends was another theme that ran through the pattern of results. The findings give credence to the notion that environmental preferences can be partitioned into a manageable number of meaningful dimensions. They further hold promise for a useful partitioning of the domain of self-esteem, an area which has traditionally been dominated by global or unitary measures and concepts.

AbstractThis article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is highly skewed. The study couples the survey valuations with unique and extensive information on respondent voting patterns. Preferences of registered voters are similar to the preferences of the population at large, but median voters value water quality more than nonvoters. The strongest contrast related to voter‐weighted preferences is among voters for different candidates, as those who voted for Gore in the 2000 presidential election have the highest environmental values. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

The possibility of a connection among high mystery, perceived danger, and depressed preference for certain categories of environments was investigated. Past research had suggested that urban alleys and narrow canyons would exhibit such a pattern. Comparison categories, chosen to be high in mystery and low in perceived danger, were urban and nonurban nature (that is, field-and-forest settings within urban or nonurban environments), respectively. Preference ratings were obtained for settings from each of the four categories. The settings were also rated by independent raters for six predictor variables: mystery, physical danger, social danger, shadow, nature, and vertical depth. The major findings were that danger was a negative predictor of preference and mystery was a positive predictor. There was no evidence that high mystery was involved in depressed preference ratings for any of the environmental categories investigated. The distinction between physical and social danger proved useful, with only social danger related (negatively) to preference.

Recreation specialization was examined as an underlying element of behavior that varies with the type and importance of environmental settings desired by recreationists. Subjects were backcountry hikers from three Intermountain West primitive areas who responded to a mailed questionnaire that assessed their level of hiking specialization and preferences for 38 environmental setting attributes. These attributes were representative of physical, social, and managerial settings. All three types of setting attributes exhibited significant relationships, with the degree of hiking specialization suggesting that specialization may be a useful concept for explaining developmental related changes in environmental perception. The results were interpreted as suggesting that current recreation management practices that focus on broad generalizations about recreation activities may be insensitive to the array of diversity sought by the recreating public.

AbstractAn instrument that political parties use to inform the electorate with regard to their policy preference (including preference towards the environment) is the electoral manifest. This paper analyses some important drivers that push political parties towards adopting pro-environmental attitudes by analysing the content included in their electoral manifestos (using the Comparative Manifesto Dataset). As explanatory factors we consider various socio-economic, ideological and international related variables, but our main focus is on environmental related determinants. We proceed as such because the paper aims to test the validity of 'the ecological approach' given that the current literature overlooks this issue or doesn't succeed in providing strong evidence of its existence. Our dataset covers 49 countries worldwide and a total of 190 national electoral years, occurring between 2000 and 2015. The resulting evidence, which might confirm the validity of 'the ecological approach', is rather weak, but there is nonetheless strong evidence to prove the existence of an opportunistic behaviour of the political parties (confirming the validity of the 'opportunistic political cycle').

Scenes of the outdoor physical environment vary substantially in the extent to which they are preferred. Variables empirically found to predict preference can be analyzed both in terms of their information-processing implications and in terms of their evolutionary significance. Some of these predictors appear to require fairly extensive information processing, thus supporting the hypothesis that a rapid, unconscious type of cognition may precede certain affective judgments. Such ties between cognition and affect are understandable in the context of the proposed theoretical framework for environmental preference. This framework not only provides a coherent guide to research but also points to the pervasiveness and significance of aesthetics as a factor in human behavior and human experience.

This article examines four domains of variables to assess their relative merit in explaining environmental preference. Within each of the domains, between three and seven specific attributes were measured, for a total of 20 predictor variables. The study site includes small forested areas, agricultural land, and fields, with little topographic variation. Preference ratings of 59 scenes representing the area serve as the dependent variable. Taken together, the 20 attributes accounted for 83 percent of the preference variance. Taken separately, the Physical Attributes lacked predictive power. Of the Informational variables, Mystery was the only significant contributor. The Land Cover types proved effective, with Weedy Fields, Scrubland, and Agriculture all significant negative predictors. Finally, the Perception-based variables were most powerful, with Openness and Smoothness particularly useful predictors. The results point to the importance of using different predictor domains, rather than relying exclusively on any one, since their role in different environmental contexts is likely to vary.

Mystery has been implicated as a positive contributor to both environmental preference and perceived danger/fear. We explored the relationships among mystery, danger, and preference as well as between them and two physical features of settings, openness and pathway curvature, in urban alleys and field/forest settings containing pathways. The major finding was that mystery was a positive predictor of both danger and preference even though the latter two variables were negatively related. Mystery, in turn, was positively related to pathway curvature and negatively related to openness. Setting category (alleys versus field/forest) was also a significant predictor of both danger (greater for alleys) and preference (greater for field/forest settings). Free-response data indicated that danger was a more common reaction than mystery for alleys, but the reverse was true for field/forest settings. The results highlight the paradoxical role that variables such as mystery can play in contributing to affective response, depending on the context in which the variables operate.