Know Where You Stand: The Awareness of a Place’s Historical Dimension on Affective and Cognitive Outcomes

Abstract

Previous research has focused on visitors’ experiences at historic sites such as concentration camp memorial sites. As such sites usually hold both, a historic dimension and physical attributes resembling the site’s history, it is an open question whether it is either the historic dimension, the physical attributes, or the interplay of both that fosters the effects on visitors. In addition, to the best of my knowledge there is no theoretical framework about the impact of historic places from a psychological perspective yet. The goal of this thesis was to address these research gaps. I summarized the literature and derived a theoretical framework about the impact of historic sites. To investigate the impact of becoming aware of a site’s historic dimension on affective and cognitive outcomes, I conducted three empirical studies. The studies’ setting was the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen, a former women’s clinic, in which a multitude of crimes were committed during the period of National Socialism (NS). Today the building offers no physical traces of its former history. By providing different prior information to the participants, their awareness of the historical dimension was systematically manipulated. The results reveal that history awareness has a substantial influence on the participants’ personal mood, but the additional information about the place’s NS history did not add much to this effect. The results indicate further that history and place awareness influences the perceived valence of related NS photos in a negative way and influences the interpretation of these photos. Also, there is partial evidence that the awareness of a site’s NS history has a negative effect on the evaluation of the site itself. However, history awareness did not influence the description or the recognition memory performance of related historic photos. This dissertation begins with situating the topic within the current sociocultural discourse, and then postulates a theoretical framework about the impact of historic places from a psychological perspective. This is followed by an overview of the conducted empirical studies. In the final section, the results are discussed and located in the theoretical framework, strengths and limitations are pointed out, and outlooks and ideas for further research are presented.