The role of place attachment and spatial anxiety in environmental knowledge

Different factors have been suggested to explain why humans differ in how well and efficiently they acquire and use spatial knowledge about environments. However, the role of emotional variables has been scarcely investigated. Here, we aimed to explore the role of the emotional dimension in terms of the emotional bonds that individuals develop towards places (i.e., the emotional dimension of place attachment that is place identity) and spatial anxiety in explaining individual differences in different kinds of environmental knowledge. A sample of ninety-nine students at the Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro (UMG) were given self-report questionnaires probing place attachment, spatial anxiety, sense of direction, and familiarity with the UMG campus. They were also given three performance tasks probing landmark, route, and survey knowledge of the UMG campus. Correlational analyses showed a significant association between place identity and all the environmental knowledge tasks, while spatial anxiety was significantly associated only with the performance in the survey knowledge task. However, the logistic regression models suggested only a contribution of place identity to landmark knowledge and no effect of spatial anxiety when familiarity and the self-reported sense of direction were considered. We propose that the emotional bond with a place could have a positive effect only in retrieving the visual features of navigational objects (i.e., landmarks), but future studies should expand on the topic with research paradigms involving the actual navigation of a real environment.