There's no place like dorm: actual-ideal dorm ambiance as a unique predictor of undergraduate mental health.

ABSTRACTUndergraduate students are a high risk population for mental health challenges. Critically, residing in a setting that fails to evoke desired emotions and perceptions may have important implications for psychological wellbeing. Although previous research has investigated the relationship between student satisfaction and architecture/building amenities, little research has investigated how the ambiance of students' residences relates to mental health. Across a pair of studies, we evaluate the relationship between actual-ideal ambiance congruency (A-IAC) and mental health outcomes and mood. In Study 1, participants completed a pair of Q-sort tasks that required them to describe both their ideal room ambiance and their current room's actual ambiance. The discrepancy between these sorts was predictive of depressive symptoms, even when controlling for key covariates (e.g., personality, health, academics). In Study 2, these results were replicated among roommate pairs using dyadic analyses, while also being predictive of anxiety symptoms. Collectively, these studies reveal a novel environmental predictor of student wellbeing that can be of value for university staff. Ultimately, these findings suggest that having the ability to create one's ideal space may prove to be beneficial and possibly protective for the mental health of undergraduate university students.

Be Our Guest: The Development of the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale.

Despite the ubiquity of hosting others in one's home, no validated measure of domestic hospitality currently exists. To address this gap, the current paper presents a set of four studies that develop and validate the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale, which seeks to capture the affective, motivational, and behavioral components of this person-place construct. The 12-item scale assesses three core dimensions: responsibility for guests, welcomingness, and a lack of perceived imposition. The analyses reported here provide support for the psychometric adequacy of this new scale, demonstrating strong internal reliability and a consistent factor structure. Moreover, this trait was found to be a unique predictor of several theoretically related constructs, including one's desired home ambiance, attitudes toward immigration, and willingness/likelihood of hosting others in need. This scale offers a much-needed means of measuring one important aspect of how people conceptualize their home environment relative to others.

Distant from others, but close to home: The relationship between home attachment and mental health during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant consequences for Americans' daily lives. Many people are spending more time in their homes due to work from home arrangements, stay at home orders, and closures of businesses and public gathering spaces. In this study, we explored how one's attachment to their home may help to buffer their mental health during this stressful time. Data were collected from a three-wave, longitudinal sampling (n=289) surveyed at baseline, two, and four weeks after. We found a clear relationship between an individual's attachment to home and positive mental health. Across all three waves, home attachment was negatively associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Furthermore, participants' home attachment at baseline was predictive of subsequent mental health two weeks after, which suggests that one's relationship to their home was particularly important during the initial onset of the national response to the outbreak. Predictors of home attachment included conscientiousness, agreeableness, and restorative ambience. Over the course of the study, kinship ambience also emerged as a predictor of home attachment. In the midst of increased mental health concerns and limited resources due to COVID-19, the home may buffer some individuals from depressive and anxiety-related symptoms by functioning as a source of refuge, security, and stability.

Ecologizing Social Psychology: The Physical Environment as a Necessary Constituent of Social Processes.

Recent trends in social psychology point to increased interest in extending current theories by better incorporating the body (e.g., embodied cognition) and the broader interpersonal context (e.g., situations). However, despite being a critical component in early social theorizing, the physical environment remains in large part underdeveloped in most research programs. In this article, I outline an ecological framework for understanding the person-environment relationship. After introducing this perspective, I describe how this approach helps reveal the critical role played by the physical environment in a variety of social processes, including childhood development, interpersonal relationships, and social identity. Finally, I review a topic in environmental psychology that has received little attention among social psychologists: territories. I provide an ecological perspective on how the design, use, and personalization of this type of environment guide and constrain regulatory processes involving social behavior, identity expression, and emotional experience.

Judging the gender of the inanimate: Benevolent sexism and gender stereotypes guide impressions of physical objects.

Within a given culture, sexist ideologies and stereotypes are largely characterized by their prescriptive expectations for the types of social and behavioural domains men and women occupy. The activities that take place within these respective domains, however, frequently involve designed, physical artefacts. This study reports a pair of studies that test whether sexist schemas are capable of guiding not only impressions of men and women as social groups, but also their impressions of the inanimate objects associated with these groups. In Study 1, benevolent sexism was found to predict a greater willingness to classify physical objects as being either highly feminine or highly masculine, even when these objects had a neutral rating by the sample as a whole. In Study 2, stereotypes consistent with legitimizing ideologies (i.e., competence and warmth) predicted rating associated objects in complementary ways, in terms of greater liking of feminine objects but greater presumed competence needed for using masculine objects. These results demonstrate how sexist beliefs and attitudes are capable of bleeding into people's impressions of the physical world.

Speaking from ignorance: not agreeing with others we believe are correct.

Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance (SFI) effect occurred 27% of the time. Experiment 2 introduced experimental controls and self-report data indicating that the SFI effect (30%) was generated by realizing values (e.g., truth, social solidarity) and pragmatic constraints to act cooperatively, rather than by a wide array of alternatives (e.g., normative pressure, reactance). Experiment 3 experimentally manipulated concern for truthfulness, yielding 49% nonagreeing answers, even though there were monetary incentives to give correct, agreeing answers. The overall pattern suggests that people are not so much conformists or independents as they are cooperative truth tellers under social and moral constraints. Results, while surprising for social influence theories, illustrate the dynamics of divergence and convergence that appear across studies in cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, as well as in social psychology.

The costs of cooperation: action-specific perception in the context of joint action.

A growing empirical literature has demonstrated that perceptions of the physical environment are influenced by the perceiver's behavioral ability. However, prior research has focused only on the perceptual consequences of individual behavior, despite the fact that individuals regularly take part in cooperative social interaction. To test whether similar effects occur as a result of engaging in joint action, we asked participants to estimate anticipated walking distance to a target location when expecting to carry a heavy object either alone or jointly with a confederate. Surprisingly, even though carrying with another person requires less physical effort, on certain carrying tasks participants estimated distances to be farther when expecting help. However, this effect was reversed when participants were asked to focus on the difficulty of the task or told about the alternative experimental condition, thereby making salient for joint carriers the potential, presumably negative, counterfactual of having to work alone. Findings are explained in terms of an ecological approach, which conceptualizes perception as the detection of information specifying affordances. These results highlight the limitations of purely effortful accounts of such phenomena and demonstrate the unique way in which social factors relevant to coordination can alter how people relate to their physical environments.