Maria Lewicka

On the Varieties of People’s Relationships With Places Hummon’s Typology Revisited

Numerous studies show that place attachment correlates positively with age, length of residence and strength of local ties and negatively with community size, education, and economic development of the region of residence. Does that mean that along with education, mobility, economic development and urbanization and with the decrease in importance of local ties and territorial belonging, place attachment will wane? In a large representative survey carried out in Poland (N = 2,556) new measures of relationships with place and of identity (both territorial and nonterritorial) were used. Cluster analysis revealed five clusters: two types of place attachment (traditional and active attachment) and three types of nonattachment (alienation, place relativity, and placelessness), corresponding to David Hummon’s five types of sense of community. Whereas correlates of traditional attachment replicated the pattern known from other studies (e.g., traditional attachment was strongly positively correlated with age and negatively with education), active attachment was related positively to education and curvilinearly to age, with middle-aged participants the most frequently represented. Traditional place attachment was based solely on local identity, active place attachment was associated with European and nonterritorial identity, along with the local attachment. A number of other measures differentiated the five types: values, measures of social and cultural capital, self- and group-continuity measures, and general life satisfaction. It is concluded that places do preserve their importance in times of intensive urbanization, migration, and economic development, but that the form of place attachment changes: the active- and self-conscious attachment replaces the traditional attachment.

RATIONAL OR UNCOMMITTED ? DEPRESSION AND INDECISIVENESS IN INTERPERSONAL DECISION MAKING

Two studies were run which tested the prediction that clinically depressed persons, known for difficulties in making a decision, would process predecisional information relevant to an interpersonal choice in a more impartial, less biased way than non-depressed persons. Both studies provided confirmation for this hypothesis. In each case, the depressed group focused less on specific alternatives, asked more criterion-based questions, and made decisions on the basis of information which was more evenly distributed over alternatives, thus conforming less to biasing, dominance structuring processes, than non-depressed participants. The depressed and non-depressed participants did not differ, however, in evaluative aspects of their decisions, suggesting a relative independence of affective and informational aspects of predecisional processes. The question arises; are depressed patients less biased and hence more rational when making decisions or are they just indifferent and uncommitted? The data have been discussed with reference to research on effortful versus automatic information processing in depression.

On Objective and Subjective Anchoring of Cognitive Acts: How Behavioural Valence Modifies Reasoning Schemata

The controversy between constructivistic and realistic views of human cognition can be reconciled by introducing the notion of the anchorage of cognitive acts. Objectively anchored cognitions serve to identify necessary conditions of outcomes and are therefore functional mainly for processing negative and non-intended occurrences, while subjectively anchored cognitions help to identify sufficient conditions of outcomes and are employed mostly to process positive and intended phenomena. Human deviations from normative models of rational judgment are the result of preoccupation with sufficiency at the expense of necessity and, hence, by the prevalence of subjectively over objectively anchored cognitions.

Place inherited or place discovered? Agency and communion in people-place bonding

Abstract Agency and communion are two modalities of human existence, corresponding to focus on individuality and achievements versus cooperation and sense of togetherness. In this paper I demonstrate that agency and communion, along with other areas of life, permeate peoples relationships with places; agency-related variables are associated with different forms of place attachment than communion-related variables. In two country-wide surveys, Polish and Ukrainian, measures were collected of place attachment, identity, social and cultural capital, values, and sense of continuity. A hierarchical cluster analysis carried out on all measures revealed two clusters corresponding to agency and communion modalities. The traditional form of place attachment (place inherited), place attachment understood as emotional bonds with the residence place (neighbourhood and city) and local identity were parts of the communion cluster, whereas active place attachment (place discovered) was a part of the agency cluster. The findings extend our knowledge about different forms of place attachment.