Disruptions in Place Attachment

  • Barbara B. Brown
  • Douglas D. Perkins
Chapter
Part of the Human Behavior and Environment book series (HUBE, volume 12)

Abstract

A study of disruptions in psychological processes can provide unique insight into their predisruption functioning as well as the disruptions themselves and their consequences. Place attachment processes normally reflect the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional embeddedness individuals experience in their sociophysical environments. An examination of disruptions in place attachments demonstrate how fundamental they are to the experience and meaning of everyday life. After the development of secure place attachments, the loss of normal attachments creates a stressful period of disruption followed by a postdisruption phase of coping with lost attachments and creating new ones. These three phases of the disruption process are examined with respect to disruptions due to burglaries, voluntary relocations, and disasters, with special attention to the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, flood and the Yungay, Peru, landslide. Underlying the diversity of disruptions, dialectic themes of stability-change and individuality-communality provide a coherent framework for understanding the temporal phases of attachment and its disruption.

Keywords

Place Attachment Communal Identity College Freshman Communal Aspect Residential Burglary 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Plenum Press, New York 1992

Authors and Affiliations

  • Barbara B. Brown
    • 1
  • Douglas D. Perkins
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Family and Consumer Studies, Environment and Behavior AreaUniversity of UtahSalt Lake CityUSA

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