An assessment of the psychologically restorative effects of the environmental characteristics of university common spaces

Abstract

The psychological health of university students has become a focal point for researchers worldwide. The field of environmental psychology introduces the notion of a “restorative environment”, which can help promote psychological health, and increasing research has demonstrated that environmental characteristics play a significant role in psychological health. University common spaces enable a range of daily behavioural activities and play a critical role in the psychological development of university students. Consequently, it is necessary to evaluate the psychologically restorative effects on the environmental characteristics of university common spaces. In this study, 408 common spaces across 11 university campuses in Guangzhou were considered as research objects, and a deep learning full convolutional network (FCN) program was used to identify the environmental characteristic elements of these common spaces. Based on the identification results, five representative categories and 25 common space forms were selected for further quantitative analysis based on k-means clustering. The psychologically restorative effects of the environmental characteristics of the 25 common space forms were evaluated using the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS). The findings indicate that (1) the environmental characteristics of the 25 common space forms can explain university students' psychologically restorative scores. Both architectural and landscape environmental characteristics directly and significantly impacted the psychologically restorative evaluations of university students. (2) Each common space's environmental characteristic elements contributed differently to the psychologically restorative evaluation. The psychological restoration of university students was primarily affected by three characteristic elements: the green view index, waterscape coverage, and openness of building enclosures. (3) Considering the environmental elements related to university students' psychological restoration and their respective magnitudes of influence, a predictive model of the psychologically restorative effects of university common spaces was successfully established. These results have practical applications for optimising the design of university common spaces and offer methodological suggestions and theoretical support for designing healthy environments on university campuses.