Percepção ambiental, assimetrias hemisféricas e suas relações com escalas: um estudo com questionários online

Abstract

Environmental perception is the way in which each human being interacts with the environment that surrounds him, using his senses, his individual characteristics and his social context. Cerebral asymmetry is the functional difference between the two hemispheres (right and left) present in the brain. Laboratory studies have found that Images that provoke negative feelings are perceived most intensely by the right brain. The objective of this work was to investigate correlations between images of natural, degraded and preserved environments, and cerebral asymmetry, as well as to search for possible correlations between images and psychometric scales. This is one of the first studies to verify hemispheric asymmetry and correlate images and psychometric scales with data obtained through online questionnaires. The survey was carried out through the SurveyMonkey platform, obtaining a number of 229 participants. Altogether seven color images were used, two of which were solitary images, one with the image of a contaminated environment with dead fish representing a Polluted Natural Environment and another with the image of a flowered space representing a Preserved Natural Environment, the other 6 images consisted of collages of these two previous images, one of the collages contained a sequence with a polluted environment on the left and a preserved environment on the right, the other collage was the inversion of this, that is, a polluted environment on the right and preserved environment on the left, both next collages focused on the center / periphery relationship, one of them placed the preserved environment in the center and the contaminated environment on the periphery and the other reversed that. Finally, a variation of the center / periphery of the image was made, with less collages and also resulting in two mirrored figures. The presentation of the images was randomized. The scales of Self-Compassion, Positive and Negative Affections, Satisfaction with Life and Scale of Environmental Concerns were also used. From the analysis, it was possible to detect significantly (T test = 2.78E-05 and p = 0.000065) the existence of human brain asymmetry and that the right brain is more sensitive to the image of a degraded environment. This is one of the first works online, which verified the existence of cerebral asymmetry and greater sensitivity of the right brain for images of a polluted nature. Thus it is possible to confirm that there is a significant difference in perception between the hemispheres of the brain and that the right side is predominant in the perception of negative emotions. Future studies are necessary to cover more fields of online data correlations, and new images can be used, including all in black and white to remove noise caused by color differences between the screens used.