Biophilic design as a new design approach promotes the integration of natural elements into the built environment, leading to a significant impact on human health, well-being, and productivity. On the other hand, scholars have explored Virtual Environment (VE) to create virtual nature and provide a complex experience of exposure to natural elements virtually. However, there is a lack of understanding about such studies in general, which use VE as a reliable tool to support biophilic design. Thus, the authors conducted a literature review on the applications, capabilities, and limitations of VE for biophilic design. The literature review shows that VE is capable of supporting critical features of biophilic design studies such as representing combinations of biophilic patterns, providing multimodal sensory inputs, simulating stress induction tasks, supporting required exposure time to observe biophilic patterns, and measuring human’s biological responses to natural environment. However, factors affecting user’s experience of a virtual biophilic environment exist, such as VE experience dimensions, user-related factors, cybersickness, navigational issues, and possible limitations of VE sensory input. Overall, biophilic design studies in VEs are still limited. Nevertheless, there are many opportunities for further research in this field.

Construction project managers (CPMs) of contractors experience a great deal of stress. In this study, the authors used job burnout as a core indicator of the chronic psychological stress of CPMs. Based on the job demand-resource model, a theoretical framework was proposed to investigate the causal path of job burnout of CPMs, especially the role of organizational justice. A questionnaire with a presurvey was developed referencing various psychometric and organizational behavior scales. Then, in 2017, a survey was conducted throughout China through face-to-face interviews, e-mails, and an online questionnaire system. The validity of the measurement was tested with confirmatory factor analysis, and the hypothetical model was validated with structural equation modeling. Subsequently, 14 mediating effects and 2 moderating effects of organizational justice on job burnout were identified. The results showed that different organizational justice dimensions have different pathways in the causal chain of job burnout of CPMs. Temporal and spatial injustice was most prominent and led to exhaustion of CPMs. Through mediating paths, distributive justice had the most significant impact on the cynicism and low professional efficacy of CPMs, while procedural and interactional injustice resulted in their exhaustion. In addition, procedural and interactional justice buffered the impact of job stress on job burnout.

Restorative environments are known as places where human stress can be decreased through restoration of depleted psychological resources. Since the efficiency of natural environments in restoration is supported by the literature, designing a restorative built environment can be obtained by integrating natural objects into built environments. However, various factors may lead to the failure of design intentions in real restorative environments such as visual stimuli and their properties. In addition, previous literature has widely used images and immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to deliver restorative environments in the design stage, and the impact of the delivery methods on visual properties needs to be considered. Therefore, the key to this study is to investigate the impact of visual stimuli and their properties on restoration along with the type of delivery method. To achieve this objective, the authors performed a literature review in two main steps. During the first step, the authors reviewed restoration and visual studies separately to understand the restoration and visual processes. Then, the second step of the review was conducted based on the results from the first step to review studies investigating the impact of different visual stimuli and properties on restoration. The literature review was conducted by combining scientometric analysis with a systematic review. In total, 1608 publications were retrieved from the Web of Science for scientometric analysis after applying search criteria. Then, the authors explored cluster reports generated by scientometric analysis to find publications for a systematic review based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. According to the results from a systematic review of 65 publications, the authors developed a restoration pathway and a visual processing framework for the first step, and a framework of visual stimuli, visual properties, and restoration for the second step.