How Place Attachment Forms And Influences Prosocial Behavior:An Interpretation Based On Neighborhood Social Environment

Place attachment refers to the emotional connection or bond between a person and a significant place.It has gained much scientific interest in recent years and contributes largely to the understanding of people-place relationship.In the view of place attachment research,place is more than a space in a geographical sense but is a setting carring specific meanings while consisiting of physicial and social environmental charateristics.Psychological research on place attachment is mainly conducted from the perspective of environmental psychology,and is basically focused on the interaction between individuals and physical environmental charateristics in the place.Considering that the type of environmental features on which place attachment is constructed can influence how place attachment funcions,it’s also necessary to take the effeces of social environmental charateristics into consideration.Thus the thesis intruoduces a social psychology perspective into the study of place attachment and conducts research at the community level.Based on the relationship between social environmental characteristics and place attachment,this study aims to explore how place attachment forms and functions.The results can provide a new prospective for interpreting prosocial bevavior based on the function of place attachment built on social environment.The study is divided into three parts,including eight formal studies and one pilot study.The first part examined the formation mechanism of place attachment.Study 1a(N = 138)manipulated the quality of the community social environment and found it significantly affected place attachment.Study 1b(N = 130)extended this finding by changing the experimental manipulation paradigm of social environmental quality and found that the destruction of social environmental characteristics reduced place attachment.Study 2(N = 130)explored how place attachement formed based on social environment through an experiment and found the mediation effect of restorative experience.Study 3(N = 958)verified the mediation mechanism through a survey on the daily lives of permanent residents in communities.The second part investigated the mechanism by which place attachment affects prosocial behavior.Study 4(N = 618)conducted a survey to reveal the positive effects of place attachment on prosocial intention in specific situations and the mediation role of trust in this relationship.Study 5(N = 128)extended these findings,showing that this mediation model also worked on predicting procial behavior indicated by civic engagement.The third part explored the effects of social environment based place attachment on prosocial behavior and the complete path from the formation to the function of place attachment.A pilot study was conducted based on publicly available sociological databases.Results based on China Family Panel Studies(2016)showed that neighborhood social environmental quality positively predicted prosocial behavior(N= 31172).And results based on Chinese Social Survey(2021)showed that neighborhood social environment increased trust in residents through the mediation effect of place attachment(N = 6896).Study 6(N = 178)found the positive effect of socal environmental quality on prosocial intention and verified the mediation role of place attchement.These results highlighted the function of social environment based place attachment.Study 7(N = 681)conducted a survey to reveal the mechanism underlying this function and constructed a chain mediation model of "social environmental quality → restorative experience → place attachment → trust →prosocial behavior".In summary,this thesis systematically tests the path from the formation to the implementation of place attachment.It expands the theoretical research on place attachment from the perspective of social environment and establishes a connection between the foundation of place attachment and its function.Furthermore,the results provide a new perspective for improving community atmosphere,promoting resident participation in community construction,and interpreting prosocial behavior through person-place bonds.