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House In Pathanapuram, Kerala-India

A home is a place where a person or family lives, perhaps spends much of their time, or where a person is comfortable being.

Concept

While a house (or other residential dwelling) is often referred to as a home, the concept of "home" is broader than a physical dwelling. Home is often a place of refuge and safety, where worldly cares fade and the things and people that one loves becomes the focus. Many people think of home in terms of where they grew up, or a time rather than a place.^[1] The word "home" is also used for various residential institutions which aspire to create a home-like atmosphere, such as a retirement home, a nursing home, a 'group home' (an orphanage for children, a retirement home for adults, a treatment facility, etc.), a foster home, etc.

There exist cultures lacking fixed homes, with nomadic people often moving their homes from place to place.

Psychological impact

Since it can be said that humans are generally creatures of habit, the state of a person's home has been known to physiologically influence their behavior, emotions, and overall mental health. For example, in the introduction to the film Patch Adams, the concept of "home" is compared to the human need for peaceful sanctuary and the absence of it thus leading to restlessness. Such restlessness, as can be seen by that particular case, may lead to depression and, ultimately, to a loss of sanity.^[2]

Other usages

The real-estate industry increasingly replaces the word house with 'home' in its literature, as in 'a four-bedroom home' or a 'modern townhome', a usage that is intended to suggest that the item being sold already has the emotional attributes of home before purchasers actually buy it. Clearly this is a marketing ploy, since a house that is for sale is either someone else's home (the vendor's or the sitting tenant's) or no-one's home, but not yet the home of a prospective purchaser. This usage, however, has crept into every day speech, in which, for example, residents of American suburban subdivisions will often refer to both vacant and inhabited buildings as "homes" rather than the once dominant and more correct term, "house."

References

1. ^ 41 results for: home. Dictionary.com. Retrieved on 2007-03-29.
2. ^ Patch Adams Script - Dialogue Transcript. Script-o-rama.com. Retrieved on 2007-03-29.

External links

• Environment Psychology Lab
• HomeImprovementShare.com A home improvement wiki. Includes articles on home automation.

See also

• Human habitat
• Ecosystem
• Environmental psychology
• Real Estate
• Homelessness