Research trends in environmental psychology: A bibliometric analysis of peer-reviewed publications, 2004-2024

Discussions about environmental psychology’s constituent research topics and future directions have persisted over several decades. In this bibliometric analysis we analysed author keywords from 4,094 journal articles, published between 2004 and 2024, from two sources: 1) key environmental psychology journals (Journal of Environmental Psychology, Environment and Behavior, Frontiers in Psychology: Environmental Psychology, and Global Environmental Psychology) and 2) other journals where authors explicitly provided ‘environmental psychology’ as an article keyword. Using VOSviewer software, we produced maps of author keyword co-occurrences to visualise topic clusters overall (2004-2024) and in discrete time periods (2004-2008, 2009-2013, 2014-2018, and 2019-2024). Taken together, the maps revealed eight overarching topic clusters: human–nature relationships; children’s experiences of environments; virtual environments; pro-environmental behaviour and sustainability; physical activity, neighbourhood, and built environment; place attachment; mental health and green space; and climate change. Some clusters appeared only in certain time periods or from a particular source, indicating changes in topic focus over time and differences depending on publication outlet. We observed a significant expansion in research on pro-environmental behaviour, sustainability and climate change within environmental psychology, and a decrease over time in the visibility of research on the built environment. We also suggest that environmental psychology has the potential to make greater contributions to research on conflict, migration, ageing, and (in)equity, which are of increasing societal urgency, in tandem with issues of environmental crises. Further, we suggest some examples of how environmental psychologists can, and are, uniting research topics in different areas of our maps in pursuit of topic integration.