Environments that help reduce stress or facilitate recovery from mental fatigue are called restorative environments, and many studies have been conducted on these environments. The International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS), which is largely a Europe-based organization, includes interest and research groups called Networks for each major topic, and the Restorative Environment Network was established in 2008 as one of the Networks. Recently in Japan, the number of studies concerning this topic has been gradually increasing. In this article, I would like to pay attention to this topic and thus vitalize further research in Japan. For this purpose, I have collected papers that discuss environmental restorativeness from diverse viewpoints.

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In its concern for a fundamental aspect of human adaptation, research on restorative environments complements research on stress and coping as a means to understanding relations between environment and health. In this article I characterize the stress, coping and restoration perspectives on adaptation, and I note some of the ways in which they complement each other. I then go on to describe a particular strand of research that has followed from the restoration perspective and which concerns a novel concept, constrained restoration.

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There are increasing social expectations of the potential recovery effect of restorative natural environments to psychologically and physically relieve daily stress. This report focuses on the restorative effect of the forest environment from natural environments, as has been clarified scientifically for around a decade in domestic research. Although often previously used in questionnaires in the medical psychology field, e.g. POMS or STAI to date, questionnaires from the environment psychology field such as PRS have recently been used to investigate the psychological restorative effect. Moreover, considerable scientific evidence of the physical restorative effect has been accumulated by several physiological indexes, from both short- and long-term stays in the forest environment. When introducing historical studies of those fields, and from the perspective of personal differences in the restorative effects, different personality traits resulting in individual differences in the psychological restorative effect in the forest environment were highlighted. Subsequently, research was conducted based on this awareness, attempting to elucidate the links between personality traits and the psychological restorative effects of the forest environment.

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It is believed that natural setting contribute to reduce stress. Kaplan (1995) proposed attention restoration theory (ART) to explain this effect and they concluded that natural setting has restorative component. In this study, we investigated whether the aquarium has restorative component and whether it is effective to reduce stress. 30 students participated in the experiment. They engaged in 15 minutes typing work, and then took the rest for 10 minutes in either of 2 kinds of rooms; the room with an aquarium and without it. Aquarium composed of some kinds of tropical fish and water plants. We measured subject's heart rate variability, eye movement, salivary alpha-amylase and their feelings during the experiment. We also measured their images of aquarium and the room which they stayed. The results of the experiment showed that 1) aquarium has restorative component and it influenced the images of the room which it was placed 2) LF/HF ratio significantly correlated to the time which subjects gazed at the aquarium.

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This paper describes the psychological effects of city life. Despite the obvious charms and advantages of living in a city, it also has its drawbacks. Major disadvantages are that living in a city poses more demands on information processing capacity and on dealing with social stressors. To prevent or alleviate these taxing consequences of city life restorative environment research offers some insights that may be beneficial for city residents. Restorative options are of two main kinds: one is the preservation of nature in the city, the other is about architectural and interior design solutions that regulate human interaction.

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Many early studies on restorative environments have focused on the natural environment. However, Kaplan et al.'s Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that an environment possessing certain features can be restorative even if it is not a natural environment. On the basis of ART, researchers in the field of environment studies have increasingly focused on various environments. Among them, the home is an environment in which people spend most of their time. The home plays a central role in the restorative process from stress in their daily lives. Consequently, the restorativeness of the home could have a considerable impact on people's psychological well-being. In this paper, I focused on the home as a restorative environment in everyday life, and I examine which elements are necessary for a home to function as a restorative place.

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Since IAPS (the International Association for People-Environment Studies) which is largely a Europe-based international academic organization on people-environment studies was established, researchers who are driving forces of MERA have been involved in many ways. Taking the opportunity of running articles as the feature on restorative environment by major researchers of Restorative Environment Network which is one of the IAPS research networks, the editor would like to put together the feature story on IAPS from its establishment to IAPS22 Glasgow this year.

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