Place attachment and healing environment: A study on the relationship between positive emotions and spatial types during campus closure

Creation of healing environment on university campus can enhance college students’ physical and mental well-being. In recent years, the emotional factors of place attachment have attracted more attention among healing environment research. However, the relationship between the spatial characteristics of different healing spaces and the aroused positive emotions remains unclear. This study investigated the places on the Siping Road Campus of Tongji University that college students most wanted to visit during campus closure and the expected activities and imagined feelings via questionnaires and interviews. Through data analysis with IBM SPSS, this study identified five clusters of positive emotions on university campus—joy, serenity, hope, pride, and interest, mapping them as well as corresponding activities with spatial types and facilities on the campus, and the healing environment spaces were divided into five types: landscape space, sports space, third space, learning space, and living space. Furtherly the interview texts were coded via MAXQNA software, from which representative themes were selected to investigate the differences of positive emotion clusters in each space type. Finally, the study proposes that promoting positive emotions through place-making is an important way to create a healing environment. The findings of this study provide a reference for planning, design, and intervention measures of healing environment on university campus.

In this study, IBM SPSS was used to perform cluster analysis on positive emotions to identify the predominant emotion categories. Based on the respondents’ emotion data, the Siping Road Campus was divided into 20 m × 20 m grid cells via ArcGIS to calculate and visualize the frequency of different positive emotions in each cell. Then land use types and facilities (e.g., green space, water body, road, building, seating facility) in each cell were identified to overlap with the positive emotions and behavioral activities. Similar approaches have been used to map and quantify place perception, but have not been used for spatial analysis of positive emotions on university campuses. The grid cells with a higher frequency of positive emotions were considered “high-frequency emotion units.” Meanwhile, all pieces of interview text were manually coded via MAXQNA software, from which representative themes were selected for ANOVA analysis in IBM SPSS to investigate the different impacts of activity type and spatial type on positive emotions.

The percentage of each cluster of positive emotions in each grid cell was calculated, and the one-way ANOVA was utilized to analyze the differences of positive emotion clusters aroused by varied spatial types. The results showed that joy, serenity, and pride emotions have significant differences among all spatial types. Then the average percentages of each emotion cluster in different spatial types were calculated via SPSS. Overall, in landscape spaces and living spaces, the percentages of serenity emotion were significantly higher than its average percentage among all spatial types; in sports spaces and third spaces, the percentages of joy emotion were significantly higher than its average percentage among all spatial types; and in learning spaces, pride and hope emotions had higher percentages than their average percentages among all spatial types.

The work entitled “Place Attachment and Healing Environment: A Study on the Relationship Between Positive Emotions and Spatial Types During Campus Closure” was published on the journal of Landscape Architecture Frontiers (Augest 28, 2023).