Limited exposure to direct nature experiences is a worrying sign of urbanization, particularly for children. Experiencing nature during childhood shapes aspects of a personal relationship with nature, crucial for sustainable decision-making processes in adulthood. Scholars often stress the need to ‘reconnect’ urban dwellers with nature; however, few elaborate on how this can be achieved. Here, we argue that nature reconnection requires urban ecosystems, with a capacity to enable environmental learning in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains, i.e., learning that occurs in the head, heart and hands of individuals. Drawing on environmental psychology, urban ecology, institutional analysis and urban planning, we present a theoretical framework for Human–Nature Connection (HNC), discuss the importance of nurturing HNC for children, elaborate on the role of property-rights and the importance of creating collective action arenas in cities for the promotion of urban resilience building. As values and environmental preconceptions underly environmental behavior, there are limits to achieving HNC in cities, as presumptive sentiments toward nature not always are positive. We end by discussing the role of new digital technologies in relation to HNC, and conclude by summarizing the major points brought forward herein, offering policy recommendations for HNC as a resilience strategy that can be adopted in cities throughout the world.

There are nine study programmes awarding the degree bachelor in engineering (högskoleingenjör) at the University of Gävle. Some of these have only a few applicants, even though the graduates are appreciated by a relatively large regional primary and secondary sector industry. A major revision of the programmes is planned. One objective is to increase the attractiveness of the programmes. In the revised programmes, students are proposed to study most courses together during the first year of study, even if they belong to different engineering specializations. This is intended to improve the study environment. Students in programmes with low numbers of applicants will become part of a richer and livelier student collective. However, the attractiveness could further be problematized by asking to whom higher education is attractive. A special focus will be on increasing the admission of students from groups in society that have been underrepresented in higher education. More specifically this may be linked to individual factors such as the educational level of parents, family income, immigrational background and geography. There may also be societal explanations in traditions of gendered professions. Engineering programmes, and especially some of the specializations at the university, are dominated by male students. This study focuses on how universities can take action to further increase the attractiveness of the engineering programmes, with a special regard to groups that are known to be underrepresented among the students.

Products and artifacts with morally loaded labels (e.g., environmentally friendly) appear to change people’s perceptions and behavior. Previous studies have shown that desktop lamps labeled “environmentally friendly” can enhance perceived color discrimination and certain reading activities, compared to a physically identical lamp labeled “conventional”. This phenomenon might arise because people may behave in line with moral principles. The generalizability and robustness of this label effect was explored in the present study, by asking participants to make trait judgments of photographed faces. In an experimental design, participants judged photos enlightened by a desktop lamp that was either labeled environmentally friendly or not labeled at all. The results revealed that participants assigned more positive traits to the photographed persons when the lamp was labeled “environmentally friendly”, at least those with high altruistic values. The pattern was reversed for people with low altruistic values. Moreover, participants rated the light from the lamp labeled “environmentally friendly” as more comfortable and claimed that the light increased (perceived) visibility. In conclusion, the source (an environmentally friendly or a conventional lamp) from which the light originates changes the evaluation of the light itself and judgments of other individuals. The paper discusses theoretical explanations of the label effects as well as its implications for pro-environmental interventions. 

Climate change is strongly linked to human behavior and technologies, and many of the barriers to sustainable behavior are rather psychological than technological. More sustainable technologies and food products have been introduced to combat climate change, most often labeled with morally loaded labels such as “organic” or “environmentally friendly”. The purpose of this thesis was, first, to gain knowledge into the psychological consequences of the introduction of eco-friendly technologies in the built environment, specifically how labeling these products “eco-friendly” influences perception and performance; secondly, to identify underlying psychological mechanisms and limits of this eco-label effect. Study 1 showed that participants generally prefer the taste of consumables labeled eco-friendly compared to conventional labeled alternatives, but the study also found that the label-effect is limited to certain products and certain judgmental dimensions. Results in this study also showed that people believe that eco-labeled products have positive effects on mental abilities. In Study 2 and 3, the focus was to study the effects of eco-labeling in the built environment on performance in cognitively demanding tasks, such as color discrimination and proofreading. At this point, the eco-label effect had been shown across a wide range of products like food, water, and office technologies, and been generalized to a wide range of judgmental dimensions and behaviors (i.e. taste, nutrition health benefits, comfortableness, and mental performance). In Study 4, results showed that eco-labeling can have effects also on behavior that arguably have very little to do with the labeling itself, by showing that social perception of photographed persons can also depend on the labeling of desktop lamps. A consistent finding across the studies was also that individual differences in environmental concern modulated the magnitude of the effect. The magnitude was larger in people with higher concern for the environment.

Visiting or viewing nature environments can have restorative psychological effects, while exposure to the built environment typically has less positive effects. A classic view is that this difference in restorative potential of nature and built environments depends on differences in the intrinsic characteristics of the stimuli. In addition, an evolutionary account is often assumed whereby restoration is believed to be a hardwired response to nature’s stimulus-features. Here, we propose the novel hypothesis that the restorative effects of a stimulus do not entirely depend on the stimulus-features per se, but also on the meaning that people assign to the stimulus. Participants conducted cognitively demanding tests prior to and after a brief pause. During the pause, the participants were exposed to an ambiguous sound consisting of pink noise with white noise interspersed. Participants in the “nature sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from a nature scene with a waterfall; participants in the “industrial sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from an industrial environment with machinery; and participants in the “control condition” were told nothing about the sound origin. Self-reported mental exhaustion showed that participants in the nature sound-source condition were more psychologically restored after the pause than participants in the industrial sound-source condition. One potential interpretation of the results is that restoration from nature experiences depends on learned, positive associations with nature; not only on hardwired responses shaped by evolution.

People tend to idealize eco-labeled products, but can eco-labeling have consequences for performance To address this question, 48 university students were asked to undertake a color discrimination task adjacent to a desktop lamp that was either labeled “environmentally friendly” or “conventional” (although they were identical). The light of the lamp labeled “environmentally friendly” was rated as more comfortable. Notably, task performance was also better when the lamp was labeled “environmentally friendly”. Individual differences in environmental concern, but not pro-environmental consumer behavior and social desirability indexes, were related to the magnitude of the eco-label effect on performance. Whilst some previous studies have shown similar placebo-like effects of eco-labels on subjective ratings, this is the first study to show an eco-label effect for artifacts in the built environment on performance, and the first study to relate this effect to environmental concern. Psychological mechanisms that may underpin the eco-label effects are discussed.

Performance on various cognitive tasks is impaired by task-irrelevant speech. The objective of this study was to manipulate the detrimental effects of task-irrelevant speech on a proofreading task, by increasing task engagement using an odd font (i.e. Haettenschweiler vs. Times). Texts were proofread in three different sound conditions (i.e. quiet, task-irrelevant speech and spectrally rotated speech). The participants searched for words (i.e. either content or function words) that were either misspelled or exchanged with contextually inappropriate words. Speech impaired detection of exchanged function words, but only when the text was written in Times, not when written in the odd font. Moreover, the participants missed fewer misspelled words in the speech condition, especially in Times, and they read more slowly in this sound condition. Taken together, these results indicate that proofreading behavior changes in the presence of task-irrelevant speech, to a more superficial/structural level of text processing (hence the improvement in detection of misspelled words), in comparison to the deeper/semantic level of text processing in the quiet condition (i.e., better detection of contextually inappropriate words). Greater task engagement (as indexed by the Haettenschweiler font), however, appears to protect the participant from the effect of sound on the ability to detect contextually inappropriate words.

This article reports 2 experiments that examine techniques to shield against the potentially disruptive effects of task-irrelevant background speech on proofreading. The participants searched for errors in texts that were either normal (i.e., written in Times New Roman font) or altered (i.e., presented either in Haettenschweiler font or in Times New Roman but masked by visual noise) in 2 sound conditions: a silent condition and a condition with background speech. Proofreading for semantic/contextual errors was impaired by speech, but only when the text was normal. This effect of speech was completely abolished when the text was written in an altered font (Experiment 1) or when it was masked by visual noise (Experiment 2). There was no functional difference between the 2 ways to alter the text with regard to the way the manipulations influenced the effects of background speech on proofreading. The results indicate that increased task demands, which lead to greater focal-task engagement, may shield against the distracting effects of background speech on proofreading. 

Two experiments will be presented which assessed free recall of spoken words in Swedish (native tongue) and in English heard under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR: +3 and +12 dB), and different reverberation times (RT: 0.3 and 1.2 s). All participants encountered these eight experimental conditions (Language*SNR*RT). The first experiment was run with college student (N=48), who were run individually. In the second experiment children in grade 4 (10-11 years, N=72) took part and they were run as a group in their regular classrooms.

Twelve wordlists in English and twelve wordlists in Swedish were generated. The words were chosen according to their ranks in category norms for the two languages. The number of words in each list was 12 for the college group and 8 for children in Grade 4. The 2 x 12 wordlists were presented in counter balanced presentation orders in three blocks (Blocks). To compare primacy and recency effects the word lists were divided into three parts (p3rd). After each wordlist the participants typed in or wrote down the words they could recall.

The basic hypotheses for the recall of the words were that working memory would be overloaded when the SNR was low and the RT was long, and that SNR and RT would interact with each other, with Language and with Study (Grade4/College). The analyses suggest that for both groups there were expected effects of language and of SNR, but the effect of RT was smaller and only showed up in interactions.

Two experiments will be presented which assessed free recall of spoken words in Swedish (native tongue) and in English heard under different signal-to-noise (SN) ratios (+3 and +12 dB), and different reverberation time (RT, .3 and 1.2 sec). All participants encountered all eight experimental conditions (Language*SN*RT). The first experiment was run with college student (N=48) and they were run individually. In the second experiment children in grade 4 (10-11 years, N=72) took part and they were run in the regular classrooms.

Twelve wordlists in Swedish and twelve wordlists in English generated. The words were chosen according to their ranks in category norms for the two languages, and no category was the same for the two languages. The number of words in each list was 12 for the college group and 8 for grade four. The 2 x 12 wordlists were presented in counter balanced presentation orders in three blocks. Within each block order of S/N and RT was also counterbalanced. After each wordlist the participants wrote down the words they could recall. Pre-experimental measures of working memory capacity were also taken.

The basic hypotheses for the recall of the words were that working memory would be overloaded when the SN-ratio was low and the RT was long, and that SN and RT would interact with each other, with Language and with Age-group.

To compare primacy and recency effects the word lists were divided into three parts (p3rd). After each wordlist the participants typed in or wrote down the words they could recall.

The basic hypotheses for the recall of the words were that working memory would be overloaded when the SNR was low and the RT was long, and that SNR and RT would interact with each other, with Language and with Study (Grade4/College). The analyses suggest that for both groups there were expected effects of language and of SNR, but the effect of RT was smaller and only showed up in interactions.

Recent years have seen a marked increase in carbon emissions despite pledges made by the international community at the Paris Accord in 2015 to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption. Rebound effects could contribute to this phenomenon as, in which attempts to curb carbon emissions might have inadvertently led to an upswing in fossil fuel usage. The present study hypothesizes that rebound effects are driven by a misapplication of compensatory balancing heuristics, with the unintended outcome of producing inaccurate estimates of the environmental impact of “green” or environmentally friendly labelled products or behaviors. The present study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between participants’ degree of compensatory thinking (e.g., “Recycling compensates for driving a car”) and their susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion, a widely replicated phenomenon demonstrating that the presence of “green” products biases carbon footprint estimations. One hundred and twelve participants were asked to complete a 15-item Compensatory Green Beliefs scale and to estimate the total carbon footprint of a set of 15 conventional houses, followed by a set that included 15 “green” houses in addition to 15 conventional houses. Results indicated that participants, on average, believed that the "green" houses were carbon neutral, and that susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion was predicted by performance on the Compensatory Green Beliefs scale. This is the first study confirming that individual differences in cognitive processes (i.e., Compensatory Green Beliefs) are indeed related to inaccurate estimates of “green” products, providing a foundation for further investigation of the influence of “green” and compensatory beliefs on carbon footprint estimates.

People tend to idealize eco-labeled products, but can eco-labeling have consequences for performance? To address this question, 48 university students were asked to undertake a color discrimination task adjacent to a desktop lamp that was either labeled “environmentally friendly” or “conventional” (although they were identical). The light of the lamp labeled “environmentally friendly” was rated as more comfortable. Notably, task performance was also better when the lamp was labeled “environmentally friendly”. Individual differences in environmental concern, but not pro-environmental consumer behavior and social desirability indexes, were related to the magnitude of the eco-label effect on performance. Whilst some previous studies have shown similar placebo-like effects of eco-labels on subjective ratings, this is the first study to show an eco-label effect for artifacts in the built environment on performance, and the first study to relate this effect to environmental concern. Psychological mechanisms that may underpin the eco-label effects are discussed.

Consumers believe that “eco-labeled” products taste better, which, at least in part, may be an effect of the label. The purpose of the current series of experiments was to examine some mechanisms and limits of this eco-label effect. In Experiment 1, an eco-label effect of similar magnitude was found for taste ratings of both conventional and organic bananas. Experiment 2 showed eco-label effects for a wider range of judgmental dimensions (i.e., health, calories, vitamins/minerals, mental performance, and willingness to pay) and the effect was about the same in magnitude for judgments of grapes and raisins. Experiment 3, with water as the tasted product, found no eco-label effect on judgments of taste, calories and vitamins/minerals, but an effect on willingness to pay, judgments of health benefits and judgments of mental performance benefits. Experiments 2 and 3 also included questionnaires on social desirability traits, schizotypal traits and pro-environmental consumer traits. The last was the strongest predictor of the eco-label effect amongst the three. In all, the eco-label effect is a robust phenomenon, but depends on interactions between product type and judgmental dimension. Implications for several accounts of the effect are discussed.

Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on to how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind, participants estimated the number of trees needed to compensate for the carbon emissions from vehicles that were traveling with various moral motives. Two experiments revealed that people think larger carbon offsets are needed to compensate for the emissions when the emissions are caused by traveling for immoral reasons, in comparison with when caused by traveling for moral reasons. Hence, moral motives influence people’s judgments of carbon-offset requirements even though these motives have no bearing on what is compensated for. Moreover, the effect was insensitive to individual differences in carbon literacy and gender and to the unit (kilograms or tons) in which the CO2 emissions were expressed to the participants. The findings stress the role of emotion in how people perceive carbon offsetting.

As the demand for eco-friendly food—produced without pesticides and environmentally harmful chemicals—increases, the need to develop genetically modified (GM) organisms that are more resistant to parasites and other environmental crop threats may increase. Because of this, products labeled both “eco-friendly” and “genetically modified” could become commonly available on the market. In this paper, we explore—in a Swedish and a UK sample—the consequences of combining eco-labeling and GM-labeling to judgments of taste, health consequences and willingness to pay for raisins. Participants tasted and evaluated four categories of raisins (eco-labeled and GM-labeled; eco-labeled; GM-labeled; and neither eco-labeled nor GM-labeled). The results suggest that there is a cost associated with adding a GM-label to an eco-labeled product: The GM-label removes the psychological benefits of the eco-label. This negative effect of the GM-label was larger among Swedish participants in comparison with UK participants, because the magnitude of the positive effect of the eco-label was larger in the Swedish sample and, hence, the negative effects of the GM-label became more pronounced. The pattern was somewhat different depending on judgmental dimension. The cost associated with adding a GM-label was larger in estimates of taste and health than in estimates of willingness to pay, at least for the Swedish sample. The roles of individual differences in attitudes, environmental concern and socially desirable responding in relation to the label effects are discussed.