Three approaches to explaining and predicting neighborhood satisfaction are compared in a survey of 550 New York City residents. The models are: a belief‐affect approach which proposes that evaluations of specific aspects of a community are combined to yield overall satisfaction ratings; a commitment approach, which looks at the impact of emotional and economic ties to the neighborhood; and an availability approach, which emphasizes the impact of salient beliefs about the community on satisfaction. Some support is found for all three models, though it is suggested that the availability approach may provide the most useful and compelling model for explaining the psychological processes involved in evaluating one's neighborhood.

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Previous research has suggested that in face-to-face contexts perceivers are biased to judge the side of the poser's face to their left as more similar to the full face than the side to their right. Traditional explanations of the perceiver bias have presumed that it is a visual field effect, with the side of the poser's face falling within the perceiver's left visual field dominating impressions of the full face. In this study, five experiments are reported. In the first experiment, the validity of the perceiver bias phenomenon was supported. The remaining experiments examined three alternative accounts of the neuropsychological processes that underlie the perceiver bias. No support was obtained for the visual field explanation, nor for an account of the bias as due to asymmetry in gaze patterns. Support was obtained for an account emphasizing a hemispatial bias in central processing. Despite equivalent intake of information from both sides of space, the brain may differentially weight information as a function of hemispatial origin. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.