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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 3, 2026

Building an Enhanced Flight Mill for the Study of Tethered Insect Flight

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Published on: March 10, 2021

Ecological affordances change with the seasons.

Ian Hohm¹, Mark Schaller¹

¹Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada ihohm@psych.ubc.ca schaller@psych.ubc.ca.

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

|June 2, 2026

Summary

Psychological responses to seasonal changes vary by life stage. An affordance-management perspective explains these differences and suggests new research directions for understanding human-environment interactions.

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Area of Science:

Environmental Psychology
Human Ecology
Developmental Psychology

Background:

Seasons significantly impact human environments and available ecological affordances.
Psychological reactions to seasonal shifts are not uniform and can be influenced by an individual's developmental stage.

Purpose of the Study:

To explore how life stage affects psychological responses to seasonal environmental changes.
To introduce and apply an affordance-management perspective to understand these variations.
To generate new hypotheses regarding seasonal psychological adaptation.

Main Methods:

Conceptual analysis integrating environmental psychology and developmental psychology.
Application of the affordance-management framework to existing research.
Identification of gaps in current understanding and proposal of future research avenues.

Main Results:

The affordance-management perspective offers a unified explanation for diverse psychological responses to seasons across different life stages.
This framework can reconcile previously disparate findings in seasonal psychology.
It highlights the dynamic interplay between environmental opportunities and individual adaptive strategies.

Conclusions:

Life stage critically modulates how individuals perceive and respond to seasonal environmental affordances.
The affordance-management perspective provides a robust theoretical lens for studying seasonal adaptation.
Further research is needed to empirically validate hypotheses generated by this perspective across the human lifespan.