Overview

The inception of this volume can be traced to a series of Environmental Psychology Colloquia presented at the University of California, Irvine, dur- ing the spring of 1974. These colloquia were held in conjunction with Social Ecology 252, a graduate seminar on Man and the Environment. Although the eight colloquia covered a wide range of topics and exemplified a diversity of research techniques, they seemed to converge on some common theoretical and methodological assumptions about the na- ture of environment-behavioral research. The apparent continuities among these colloquia suggested the utility of developing a manuscript that would provide a historical overview of research on environment and be- havior, a representation of its major concerns, and an analysis of its concep- tual and empirical trends. Thus, expanded versions of the initial presen- tations were integrated with a supplemental set of invited manuscripts to yield the present volume of original contributions by leading researchers in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology.