Time for the Familiar!

During the holidays, and actually throughout the year, familiar really can be best—we do like spaces to change or evolve slightly over time and even to vary slightly by time of day or season of the year, but too many changes, too quickly can make us feel stressed, ill-at-ease.  Familiarity is prized in art and architecture and elsewhere as well.

So, open the drapes to make sure you experience natural light at different hours, and bring in seasonal items from your garden and display them prominently, but don’t change your home too dramatically from one moment to the next, especially when you’ll be trying to relax.

Two research studies related to familiarity in design really stand out.

• Litt and colleagues (2011) report that we are particularly attracted to the familiar when we feel stressed: “This ‘devil you know’ preference under pressure contrasted with disfavouring of the negatively familiar option in a pressure-free situation. These results demonstrate that pressure-induced flights to familiarity can sometimes aggravate rather than ameliorate pressure, and can occur even when available evidence points to the suboptimality of familiar options.”  Litt and team summarize: “familiarity preferences amplified by felt pressure may be more than simply detrimental and may in fact precisely backfire, leading to decisions contrary to the relief and amelioration of such pressure . . . results illustrate how stress-induced familiarity favouring can perversely exacerbate the very stressor that is its source.”

 

• Similarly, Ortlieb and Carbon (2019)  report that “Whenever we feel safe and self-sufficient, an appetence [longing] for arousal (curiosity) is likely to arise that increases our interest in unfamiliar conspecifics as well as in innovative, cognitively challenging aesthetic stimuli (art). By contrast, when we feel vulnerable and dependent, a longing for safety and relatedness (nostalgia) attracts us not only to familiar and trustworthy individuals but also to conventional aesthetic stimuli charged with positive emotions. . . . any episode in life during which needs for security and attachment are significantly augmented (e.g., couples expecting a baby) should be associated with a greater susceptibility for familiar, easy-to-process-stimuli, whereas life events that boost people’s sense of achievement (e.g., passing one’s final exams) and autonomy (e.g., leaving the parental home) should coincide with a state of increased appetence for novelty also in the aesthetic domain.”

 

In other words when we need comfort, the familiar gives us an “easy-to-process” environment, whereas when we’re feeling safe and self-sufficient we like change and seek it.

Ab Litt, Taly Reich, Senia Maymin, and Baba Shiv. 2011.  “Pressure and Perverse Flights to Familiarity.”  Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 523-531.

Stefan Ortlieb and Claus-Christian Carbon.  2019. “A Functional Model of Kitsch and Art: Linking Aesthetic Appreciation to the Dynamics of Social Motivation.”  Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02437