Abstract
This study investigates the influence of personality traits and water masking installations on the perceived restorativeness of an urban park by means of Multisensory Immersive Virtual Reality (M-IVR) methodology. To this aim, 95 adults (67 females, 28 males) were administered the NEO-FFI to measure personality and were presented two kinds of M-IVR scenarios, representing an urban park without any installation (S0) and the same park with a water installation (S1); in both scenarios, the perceived restorativeness was measured by means of the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS-11). Results of ANOVAs showed that the perceived restorativeness (fascination and being-away components) was increased by the water installations, but that the effect was attenuated by personality. Correlation analysis showed that the extroversion dimension was weakly and negatively related to the fascination and being-away change score. These results suggest that M-IVR is a valid paradigm to investigate in a controlled but ecological way the effect of installations on the perceived restorativeness of environment and showed that beneficial effect of water installations on the evaluation of urban green parks is also related to personality characteristics.
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Senese, V.P. et al. (2020). The Influence of Personality Traits on the Measure of Restorativeness in an Urban Park: A Multisensory Immersive Virtual Reality Study. In: Esposito, A., Faundez-Zanuy, M., Morabito, F., Pasero, E. (eds) Neural Approaches to Dynamics of Signal Exchanges. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 151. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8950-4_31
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