Dataset - The heart of a daily journey: How emotional are landmarks?

The objective of this study was to examines whether the spatial landmarks that people use during a familiar and frequently taken path possess an affective component. Participants completed an online questionnaire in which they were instructed to think of a route they take on a regular basis, and to name five landmarks that spontaneously came to their mind along that path. After reporting these landmarks, participants were asked to rank them by order of importance and to indicate the emotion that they associated with them in terms of valence and arousal. Individual characteristics of participants (age, gender, activity, home environment, etc.), the specific features of their path (departure and arrival, distance travelled, mode of transport, etc.), and the nature of the landmarks reported were also considered.
Our hypotheses were that a significant proportion of the landmarks reported by participants should be affecively laden and that this affective value would be linked to their subjective importance. As regards the nature of landmarks reported, we expected to observe a majority of buildings, but also a significant proportion of road infrastructureand natural elements.
The results obtained indicate that, irrespective of individual characteristics, participants predominantly reported positively valenced, highly arousing landmarks. Depending on their nature and associated emotions, different landmark profiles emerged, with a positive correlation between a landmark’s valence and its subjective importance. Overall, these findings confirm the existence of an affective component in most of the landmarks used by individuals in their everyday life and corroborate the relevance of the recent line of research studying its impact on spatial learning.

Description of the content of the CSV file: Each line corresponds to a participant's response and contains their socio-demographic information (gender, age, type of environment of residence, activity), each of the 5 landmarks they reported with their associated valence and arousal score, subjective importance rank, the category into which they were classified (according to their nature, translated into English) as well as the characteristics of the route reported (duration, approximate length, mode of transport used, frequency of travel, departure and arrival etc.).