What Is Ecopsychology?

Ecological psychology, a branch of psychology. A discipline that studies the causes of individual behavior using an ecological perspective. Psychological research mostly focuses on the response of a single individual to a single stimulus, and also recognizes the important role of social variables in understanding behavior, while the ecological view of psychology further emphasizes that individual behavior and its environmental conditions (interpersonal, social, natural) are non-splittable. Buck and Wright's careful analysis of public behavior in two small towns at the University of Kansas is a typical study.

The term "ecological psychology" mostly refers to the ecological-oriented psychological research that was created in the 1940s and 1970s by Lewin, Buck, Gibson, Naise, Brunswick, and others. Theories and methods are introduced into psychological research, and ecological theories and methods are used to transform traditional psychology. It is a critique and transformation of mainstream psychology initiated from within mainstream psychology. In response to the "artificial" defects of mainstream psychological experimental methods, it introduced ecological perspectives into the field of psychological research and advocated the ecologicalization of psychological research. Ecological research methods directly influence the research orientation of ecological psychology. Ecological psychology emphasizes natural observation and field research. It advocates that psychological phenomena can only be understood in the background. The object of psychological research must be changed from laboratory behavior to real life behavior, and only from examining individual organisms to examining the relationship between organisms and the environment . The research method of ecological psychology is a natural regression of ecological field observations on human studies ^[1]

There are broad and narrow senses of ecological psychology, and what we usually refer to is narrow ecological ecology. The core of the two major theories of narrow ecological psychology is the theoretical paradigm represented by Buck and Gibson. The ideas of others are basically developed on the basis of integrating and extending their ideas. As a research orientation, the narrow sense of ecological psychology can be initially defined as: ecological psychology is a dynamic interaction process that emphasizes the study of animal (human) -environmental interactions, and is particularly inclined to study functionally meaningful psychology in ecological environments The orientation of the phenomenon.

Ecological psychology is an orientation that develops with the development of mainstream psychology, but it has always been on the margins of psychological research and has been largely neglected. With the efforts of a group of psychologists who advocate ecological psychology, especially when mainstream psychology is in trouble, ecological psychology has gradually attracted people's attention due to its own advantages.

Ecological psychology takes ecological philosophy as the new foundation, the principle of interaction as the central principle, and the experimental methods of ecological validity and naturalistic research as the main methods. It studies, explains and interprets the relationship between people and the environment. Predict behavior and psychological phenomena in real life. Compared with the traditional mainstream psychology, it is more in line with the urgent needs of social life for psychological research and more in line with the real situation of human psychology. Therefore, at present, it has extensive research and application in various branches of psychology.

In the field of psychological counseling and psychotherapy, there have always been two opposing factions, internal and external. The analysis school (or psychodynamics school) emphasizes the role of internal factors such as drives, needs, and motivation; the behavior school emphasizes external factors, and advocates changing by controlling external stimuli or strengthening the role of rewards and punishments personal behavior.

The ecological view of behavior embraces internal factors and external factors, emphasizing the interaction between the two, without rigorous discrimination of cause and effect. Cognitive-behavioral therapies and family therapy, which have become popular in recent years, are examples of applying this theory. Ecological psychology believes that in the process of psychological counseling and treatment, only by organically promoting the individual's psychological growth and changing the external environment, the two will adapt to each other and change simultaneously, in order to receive long-term and stable results.

Ecological psychology can supplement and correct the deficiencies and errors of traditional mainstream psychology, and to a certain extent, it can provide a new perspective for some theoretical issues in contemporary psychology. There are four main development trends in current psychology: high-tech, comprehensive, localization, and practicality. Ecological psychology is a research orientation that coincides with these development trends. Therefore, ecological psychology is a vital research orientation.