Special issue. Places and human behaviour: from local to global — PSICAMB 2017 / XIV Conference on Environmental Psychology (Número especial. Espacios y comportamiento humano: de lo local a lo global. PSICAMB 2017 / XIV Congreso de Psicología Ambiental)

Abstract

This special issue publishes a selection of works presented at the XIV Conference on Environmental Psychology, held in Évora in June 2017, under the auspices of PSICAMB-Asociación de Psicología Ambiental. The theme of the conference, ‘Places and Human Behaviour: From Local to Global’, was intended to highlight the spirit of past and present environmental psychology — the study of human behaviour contextualized in space — and to cover a number of possible different approaches, from very delimited spaces to different types of places to the global dimension of human behaviour and the challenges humankind is facing today.Translation from English/ Traducción del inglés: Miguel del Río The works presented at the conference (in different formats such as keynotes, symposia, oral presentations and posters) followed its motto, focusing on the study of questions related to quality of life and the aforementioned human challenges. Accordingly, the articles selected in this special issue present research about human and social psychological processes involved in different types of local and global contexts. Two of the articles are works presented by two young researchers, Minh-Xuan Truong et al. and Samuel Domingos et al., winners of the Fourth Edition of the Rocío Martín Herreros Environmental Psychology Research Award (Premio Rocío Martín Herreros de Investigación en Psicología Ambiental). This special issue compiles 11 articles covering mainly two areas of research in environmental psychology that have seen an important development in recent years: the human relation to nature, identity and well-being and the perception of risks, vulnerability and coping. Thefirst group of articles addresses the study of human relation to nature and its impact on identity andwell-being. Their authors hail from the research area that studies the affective and cognitive ties to nature, and intends to understand how contact with nature can contribute to humanwell-being. Furthermore, two articles are inscribedwithin an applied approach, one to a health context and another to an urban context. The first article from Rocío Martín Award-winner Truong, along with Bonnefoy and Prévot, presents an innovative research work revealing the importance of taking into account the variety of sensory dimensions of human-nature experiences. The remaining two articles (by Mena-García, Olivos, Loureiro, and Navarro, and by