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.).本研究旨在探究人们在熟悉且常行经的路径中所使用的空间地标(spatial landmarks)是否具备情感成分。参与者需完成一份在线问卷，被要求回想一条日常固定往返的路线，并列出沿途自发浮现的五个空间地标。报告这些地标后，参与者需按重要性对其进行排序，并从效价(valence)与唤醒度(arousal)两个维度说明与之关联的情绪。此外，研究还纳入了参与者的个体特征(年龄、性别、日常活动、居住环境等)、路线的具体参数(出发地与目的地、行程距离、交通方式等)以及所报告地标的属性。 本研究的假设为：参与者报告的地标中，有相当比例带有情感负载，且该情感价值与其主观重要性存在关联。就所报告地标的属性而言，我们预期多数地标为建筑物，同时也会有相当比例的道路基础设施与自然元素。 所得结果表明，无论个体特征如何，参与者报告的地标多为正效价、高唤醒度的地标。根据地标的属性与关联情绪的差异，可区分出不同的地标特征模式，且地标效价与其主观重要性呈正相关。总体而言，这些发现证实了个体日常路径中使用的多数地标均存在情感成分，并验证了近期探究其对空间学习影响的研究方向的合理性。 CSV文件内容说明：每一行对应一位参与者的作答数据，包含其社会人口学信息(性别、年龄、居住环境类型、日常活动)、所报告的5个地标(每个地标附带对应的效价与唤醒度评分、主观重要性排序、按属性分类的类别(以英文表述))，以及所报告路线的特征(行程时长、大致长度、使用的交通方式、出行频率、出发地与目的地等)。