Abstract
Grass-root feedback to public agencies’ policies for coping with global change threats is poor and reactive. Concurrently, human population becomes more urban, isolated from nature and unable to take personal decisions about it. Therefore, helping societal involvement and proactive behavior towards nature is a crucial challenge nowadays. This paper intends to explore the role of emotions in support of a positive interaction in human/environment systems, to assess their evolutionary changes and ways to eventually readdress its trend. For that purpose, the latest neuroscientific findings are applied to disentangle the nature impact on the human emotional system by comparing the present people’s attitudes to those from pre-agrarian cultures. This knowledge allows drawing guidelines to improve people´s concern to care for the environment.
Highlights
(ii) Basic emotions are processed in old brain structures, which are evolved adaptively to natural environments through landscape experiences, long before the first Homo sp. inhabited the savanna two million years ago
Emotions sharing may happen in our environment context, it emerges from two sources that provide the emotional stuff to be shared: one spreads bottom up pushed by the evolution of empathy; the other works top down pushed by the symbolic development
Late neuro-scientific research enables substantial advances to our knowledge on the psychological processes involved in the interaction between humans and their environment
Summary
Attention is a complex cognitive process that involves alertness, spatial orientation and solving informational conflicts (Petersen and Posner, 2012). Perception results from a subset of the whole range of stimuli that reach the subject at a particular moment They are highlighted by attention as competent to raise emotions or to convey information to the cognitive system. Neural processing has been investigated in visual perception (Wagermans et al, 2012a, 2012b) and relies on the high capacity of humans to distinguish spatial patterns. This means their ability to differentiate shapes of isolated objects from the ground textures (Fig. 3) (Zhang and Heydt, 2010; Bullier, 2001; Russell and Etienne-Cummings, 2012). This facilitates some kind of understandable representation previous to action (Puigdefábregas and Pérez García, 2014)
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