Environment and Behavior

Environment and Behavior is a leading international journal that publishes research examining the relationships between human behavior and the built and natural environments since 1969. Motivated by its half-century anniversary, the present article uses the Web of Science Core Collection database to provide a bibliometric overview of the leading trends that have occurred in the journal during the 1969-2018 period. The impact of the journal has increased over the years, Gary W. Evans is the author with most published papers, articles by Paul C. Stern and Thomas Dietz have made a notable scientific impact, the University of Michigan is the institution with the highest number of publications, and there is a growing trend in the number of women and international contributors to the journal. This bibliographic review provides strong evidence of the scientific impact of the journal, and the wider Environment-and-Behavior community should be proud of its story of success.

A growing body of research suggests a positive connection between climate change and crime, but few studies have explored the seasonal nature of that link. Here, we examine how the impact of climate change on crime may partly depend on specific times of the year as recent climatological research suggests that climate change may have a diverging impact during different times of the year. To do so, we utilize the largest, most current dataset of all main categories of reported crime by month and year in the United States—the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports. We employ historical weather data collected by the Global Historical Climatology Network to measure climate change, and develop a procedure that weighs and connects these data to individual crime reporting agencies. We discover not only a positive association between climate change and crime but also substantial monthly variation in this association.

Approximately, 2.4 billion people, globally, lack access to safe toilets. The burden of this deficiency falls disproportionately on women living in informal settlements in developing countries. While there is a growing body of literature looking at the factors influencing women’s sanitation behavior, little is known about the role of the neighborhood environment. This study sought to explore this issue using data from a 2016 mixed-methods study focused on women in Mathare Valley informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. Qualitative and quantitative data were used to analyze the role of neighborhood disorganization in the relationship between women’s sanitation-related stressors and their sanitation behaviors (utilization). Findings suggest that neighborhood disorganization is inextricably linked to women’s daily sanitation behaviors and the stressors that are associated with those behaviors. These results suggest that the health and safety of neighborhood environments may be critical factors in the future success of sanitation-related interventions and policies.

Engagement in proenvironmental behavior can be understood in part by considering how individuals operate as members of social communities and are influenced by these communities. In the present work, we use social network analysis to explore how social network structure predicts proenvironmental behavior. We consider three types of behaviors—(a) private, (b) public nonorganizational, and (c) organizational behaviors—and consider the potential for (i) behavioral diffusion and (ii) two types of opinion leader influence for each of these three behaviors within a religious social community. Results are consistent with patterns indicating diffusion for public nonorganizational and organizational, but not private behaviors. In contrast, being well connected with many opinion leaders to whom one would go for advice (but not simply being friends with these individuals) is associated with greater engagement in all three types of proenvironmental behavior.

Chronic crowding within housing adversely affects psychological well-being, yet little is known about how design attributes contribute to these effects, especially among children. This cross-sectional study first examined associations between residential interior density and children’s (M = 9 years of age) perceived bedroom and home crowding. Second, analyses investigated whether interior design attributes (residential floor plan arrangement measured by space syntax [depth and permeability]; bedroom ceiling height, volume, and window area) buffer negative effects of perceived crowding on multimethodological indices of child development, including psychological distress, learned helplessness, and physiological stress. After adjusting for home type, clutter, income, gender, and age, interior density was significantly associated with perceived home and bedroom crowding. Regression results suggested that bedroom ceiling height was associated with reduced negative effects of home, but not bedroom, perceived crowding on blood pressure, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and allostatic load among participants who reported higher levels of perceived crowding.

This article focuses on the interactions between individual differences and building characteristics that may occur during multilevel wayfinding. Using the Seattle Central Library as our test case, we defined a series of within-floor and between-floor wayfinding tasks based on different building analyses of this uniquely designed structure. Tracking our 59 participants while they completed assigned tasks on-site, we examined their wayfinding performance across tasks and in relation to a variety of individual differences measures and wayfinding strategies. Both individual differences and spatial configuration, as well as the organization of the physical space, were related to the wayfinding challenges inherent to this library. We also found wayfinding differences based on other, nonspatial features, such as semantic expectations about destinations. Together, these results indicate that researchers and building planners must consider the interactions among building, human, and task characteristics in a more nuanced fashion.