L’importanza del paesaggio europeo e mediterraneo per la preferenza ambientale e l’identità

The Importance of European and Mediterranean Landscapes in Environmental Preference and Identity. Many scholars stress the fundamental role of the perceptive dimension of the landscape. This study is a part of a wider research project, targeting the relationship among prototypical landscapes, preferences and identitarian meaning. Literature on Environmental Psychology suggests that landscapes can play an important role in the development of personal Identity. Place-identity, in turn, is a dimension of the Self definition of the individual’s personal identity related to the physical environment. Thus we selected prototypical European (vs. Not-European) and Mediterranean (vs. Not-Mediterranean) landscapes in order to detect differences in implicit preference and identification towards them. Participants (N=30 residents of the Italian Region of Sardinia) were submitted to the Implicit Association Test, which is an experimental technique measuring the strength of association between two concepts (in this case represented respectively by pictures and words). Results showed a higher level of preference for and identification with the Mediterranean (vs. Not Mediterranean) landscapes, and a higher degree of preference for European (vs. Not European) landscapes.