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Unit 24: Psychotherapy: Environmental Approach

distributed areas of the brain. Due to its anterior location within the frontal cortex, the orbitofrontal Notes
cortex may make judgments about the environment, and refine the organism’s “understanding”
through error analysis, and other processes specific to prefrontal cortex. But to be certain, there is no
single brain area dedicated to the organisms’s interactions with its environment. Rather, all brain
areas are dedicated to this task. Moreover, the orbitofrontal cortex may show the greatest change in
blood oxygenation (BOLD level) when an organism thinks of the broad, and amorphous category
referred to as “the environment.” Because of the recent concern with the environment, environmental
consciousness or awareness has come to be related to the growth and development of understanding
and consciousness toward the biophysical environment and its problems.

One area (probably the orbitofrontal cortex) may collate the various pieces of the
informational puzzle in order to develop a long term strategy of engagement with the
ever changing “environment”.
Self Assessment

1. Fill in the blanks :
(i) ______ of psychotherapy is an inter disciplinary field focussed on the interplay between
humans and their surroundings.
(ii) _______ is said to be the first to mention environmental approach of psychotherapy.

(iii) Environmental psychologists have theorized that ______ and ______ can have an adverse
effect on mod and may cause stress related illness.

24.5 Behaviour Setting

The earliest noteworthy discoveries in the field of environmental psychology can be dated back to
Roger Barker who created the field of ecological psychology. Founding his research station in
Oskaloosa, Kansas in 1947, his field observations expanded into the theory that social settings
influence behavior. Empirical data gathered in Oskaloosa from 1947 to 1972 helped him develop the
concept of the “behavior setting” to help explain the relationship between the individual and the
immediate environment. This was further explored in his work with Paul Gump in the book Big
School, Small School : High School Size and Student Behavior. One of the first insightful explanations on
why groups tend to be less satisfying for their members as they increase in size, their studies illustrated
that large school had a similar number of behavior settings to that of small schools. This resulted in
the students’ ability to presume many different roles in small schools (e.g. be in the school band and
the school football team) but in larger schools there was a propensity to deliberate over their social
choices.
In this book Ecological Psychology Barker stresses the importance of the town’s behavior and
environment as the residents’ most ordinary instrument of describing their environment. “The hybrid,
eco-behavioral character of behavior settings appear to present Midwest’s inhabitants with no
difficulty; nouns that combine milieu and standing behavior are common, e.g. oyster supper,
basketball game, turkey dinner, golden gavel ceremony, cake walk, back surgery, gift exchange,
livestock auction, auto repair.”

Barker argued that his students should implement T-methods (psychologist as ‘transducer’: i.e.
methods in which they studied man in his ‘natural environment’) rather than O-methods (psychologist
as “operators” i.e. experimental methods). Basically, Barker preferred fieldwork and direct observation

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