Place Attachment Enhances Psychological Need Satisfaction

Attachment to place may contribute to individuals’ well-being. We evaluated whether visualizing a place of attachment (compared with visualizing a nonattached familiar place) could increase the satisfaction of key psychological needs. Place attachment visualizations increased participants’ levels of self-esteem, meaning, and belonging. Furthermore, visualizing places at a certain geographical scale helped to improve meaning, self-esteem, and belonging among participants who had been ostracized. This is the first study to treat place attachment as an independent variable in an experimental design, so it broadens the options for internally valid, methodologically diverse place attachment research.