A systematic review of objective factors influencing behavior in public open spaces

As a significant part of outdoor built-environment, public open spaces are closely associated with people's daily lives. Studies of outdoor behavior in these spaces can shed light on users' environmental perceptions and contribute to the promotion of physiological and psychological health. Many recent studies are case studies focused where observations, surveys and interviews have been conducted to understand the factors influencing people's behavior on one or few sites or city environments. There have been few reviews related to this topic, and none have been based on the systematic understanding of influencing factors. This paper presents a systematic review of interactions between behavior and the built environment in public open spaces, and highlights the impacts of diverse and objective influencing factors. Followed the rules of PRISMA method (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), 109 papers published in 2000–2021 were selected and reviewed. The distribution of the studied interactions is analyzed, and the impacts of four distinct factors: personal background, location and context, environmental component, and climate stimuli, are extracted, categorized, and specified. Moreover, outdoor health benefits are discussed based on which, crucial factors that require emphasis after the outbreak of COVID-19 are identified. Throughout this paper, behavioral influencing processes, including objective influencing factors, subjective feedback, and the relationships involved, are considered to provide a comprehensive picture. With the robust classification of existing factors, architects, urban designers, policy makers and fellow researches could be easier to get a more comprehensive trend from the past. This paper also provides guidance for future research, especially given that COVID-19 has created huge changes to outdoor needs and customary behavior

Behaviour in public open spaces: A systematic review of studies with quantitative research methods

Public open spaces are important assets that play a significant role in city lives, based on which a great number of behaviour-based studies are being conducted. These studies often use one or more case studies to observe people's preferences and usage habits and to investigate their influencing factors such as outdoor thermal comfort, environmental conditions, urban configuration, and local settings. Because the subject is complex and falls within the purview of multiple academic disciplines, it is a challenging task to understand the current status and development trends of existing studies. To fill this gap, this article presents a systematic review of quantitative evidence-based behaviour studies in public open spaces. Following the PRISMA method and searching using eight academic search engines, full texts of 116 research articles have been included for this review. The main contributions of this review are that: (1) it proposed a relatively complete system that categorizes people's behaviour in public open spaces; (2) it introduced outdoor subjective influencing procedure including behaviour, feeling and health impacts; (3) the review illustrated the distribution of existing research as well as research trends; and finally (4) the article also timely discussed the influence of the COVID-19 on people's behaviour in public open spaces. The authors consider this article to be useful as it can facilitate further behaviour-based studies in public open spaces. With a robust classification and future trend discussion of factors associated, fellow researchers, urban designers, city managers, and policymakers are easier to integrate and use the knowledge learned

Temporal dynamics of disgust and morality: an event-related potential study.

Disgust is argued to be an emotion that motivates the avoidance of disease-causing entities in the physical domain and unacceptable behaviors in the social-moral domain. Empirical work from behavioral, physiological and brain imaging studies suggests moral judgments are strongly modulated by disgust feelings. Yet, it remains unclear how they are related in the time course of neural processing. Examining the temporal order of disgust emotion and morality could help to clarify the role of disgust in moral judgments. In the present research, a Go/No-Go paradigm was employed to evoke lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) to investigate the temporal order of physical disgust and moral information processing. Participants were asked to give a "yes" or "no" response regarding the physical disgust and moral wrongness of a social act. The results showed that the evaluation of moral information was processed prior to that of physical disgust information. This suggests that moral information is available earlier than physical disgust, and provides more data on the biological heterogeneity between disgust and morality in terms of the time course of neural activity. The findings implicate that physical disgust emotion may not be necessary for people to make moral judgments. They also suggest that some of our moral experience may be more fundamental (than physical disgust experience) to our survival and development, as humans spend a considerable amount of time engaging in social interaction

Examples of the statements used and responses made in session 1 of the Go/No-Go paradigm.

<p>Examples of the statements used and responses made in session 1 of the Go/No-Go paradigm.</p

The average percentages of “immoral” and “disgusting” responses for each type of the stimuli.

<p>WD = wrong and disgusting; WN = wrong and non-disgusting; ND = (morally) neutral and disgusting; NN = (morally) neutral and non-disgusting. Error bars: 95% CI.</p

An illustration of the sequence of events in an experimental trial.

<p>An illustration of the sequence of events in an experimental trial.</p

Grand average LRPs on Go trials and No-Go trials.

<p>(a) Session 1. (b) Session 2.</p