Trees for Brains
Kuhn and colleagues report that “Previous research has suggested an association between living environment during the first 15 years of life and brain structure. More precisely, urbanicity during upbringing has been shown to be...
Designing for Health and Happiness
Design can definitely make you feel happy, what’s technically known in the psych biz as improving your mental health. Being happier can be good for your physical health, it can make your immune system...
Boosting Physical Health, Via Place Design
The most obvious ways that design can improve physical health is by not actively harming users—off gassing fatal to inhale chemicals, being appropriate ergonomically, etc. Once all of the active threats are eliminated from...
How to design for creativity – The Long Read
The findings that follow are place-independent; they hold, and can be applied, whether people are at home, in a corporate workplace, at a co-working site, or somewhere else entirely. Also, always remember, that a...
Wood for healthy minds
As you ponder your re-design options keep the benefits of using wood in mind. Working natural materials into spaces is an important tenet of biophilic design—and particularly positive results ensue from using materials—such as...
Wild Swimming
Wild swimming has been having a moment, for the last few decades, and likely will get even more attention when people swim in the Seine during the 2024 Paris Olympics—although jumping into the Seine...
Environmental Psychology in the News
The Wonders of Awe Eva Rothenberg (“Why Looking at Awe-Inspiring Art Could Lead to a Happier, Healthier Life,” 2023 https://www.cnn.com/style/article/awe-wonder-art/index.html) gets to the root of why awe is good for us. As she details,...
More nature = less phone use
Minor and colleagues found that “Evidence links greenspace exposure with restorative benefits to cognition and well-being, yet nature contact is declining for younger demographics. . . . we analyzed ~2.5 million observations of logged...
Same place same behaviour
Research study with mice indicates that “Environmental context plays a major role in chemical dependence and addiction, inducing or reinforcing compulsive drug-seeking behavior. . . . ‘To understand what this means in humans, simply...
Culture and Art
Brinkman and colleagues found that people from Austria and from Japan literally use their eyes differently when looking at European and Japanese art and photographs. The researchers report that “Possibly those differences are related...
What shape and colour apartment?
Kleeman and Foster’s study of the implications of spending extended periods of time in home apartments during the COVID-19 lockdowns are fairly predictable: “Compared to the pre-pandemic period, after the lockdown residents reported less satisfaction...
Desirable Amounts of Greenery
In a study relevant to the design of offices everywhere, at home and elsewhere, Elbertse, and Steenbekkers report that their “study aims to explore the effect of different volumes of indoor greenery on perceived...
Neighbourhood Perceptions, Evaluations and Wellbeing
Ayalon determined that “the importance of subjective mediators, rather than objective ones in explaining the association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and wellbeing.” Wellbeing was higher when perceived neighborhood disorder was lower and neighborhood cohesion...
Health by the Sea
Geiger and colleagues report that they analyzed “data from the Seas, Oceans, and Public Health In Europe (SOPHIE) and Australia (SOPHIA) surveys to. . . . find broad cross-country generalizability that living nearer to...
Feeling Happy at Home
Shepherd, Selvey, Earon, and Wiking studied row house communities in Denmark and in the United Kingdom and learned that “The key drivers to happiness [resident wellbeing]: balancing the private and the communal; personalising the...
Exercise Effects and Biophilia
Zhang and colleagues learned that “Physical activity performed in a natural environment, especially among green spaces, is associated with mental health benefits. . . . [study participants] engaged in incremental cycling exercise at a...
Neuroscience of Water – Seeing it, Hearing it
Water has been and will remain crucial to our species continued existence—so, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that neuroscientists have studied how seeing and hearing water influences what goes on in our heads,...
Sensory Mashup
For better or for worse (mainly for better), most of us have multiple senses working at the same time, all bringing information from the world around us into our brains. All of that material...
Using Natural Materials
It’s renovation season! As you ponder your re-design options keep the benefits of using natural materials – wood, stone, linen and cotton, etc. – in mind. Working natural materials into spaces is an important...
Plan in Nature Sounds
There are oodles of benefits from hearing nature sounds as you live your life. You may not have added a nature soundtrack already because you think they’re hard to find or expensive. Not so! ...
Perceptions can prevail over Reality
In the course of your lives you’ve likely seen people respond to spaces and/or objects in them in a way that seems much more subjective than objective. Rest assured, the differences that you think...
Why bother to clean?
If you’ve just gone to all of the effort to Spring clean your home, the time you invested has been time well spent—regardless of whether you’ve removed any actual health hazards from your home...
Memories, Selfies and other Photos
Selfies play a different role in our lives than other photos. A Niese-lead team found that “When photographing moments in their lives, people can use a first-person (capturing the scene as they saw it)...
If you want a bargain, avoid long sun exposure….
Maybe some things are better off done away from daylight. Sun and colleagues report that “We examine sunshine-induced mood and its impacts on investors’ bidding decisions in the primary market where seasoned equities are...
Pulses of Background Music
Felszeghy and teammates set out learn how listening to music influences stress levels and performance of manual tasks by studying dental students listening to what was categorized as “slow background music”: “the music reduced...
More on Subjective Perception
Feeling things as it turns out, relates to believing things. Dinse, Newen, and Tegenthoff learned in a study using hypnosis that “If we sincerely believe that our index finger is five times bigger than...
Growing up Green is Good!
Mygind and colleagues determined via data collected for 5-to 12-year olds that “Vegetation cover around the home might support the formation of social skills through higher order reasoning about emotion experience and cause and...
Benefits of Virtual Art
Trupp and colleagues have learned that seeing art virtually shares benefits with seeing it “live”: “Brief online art viewing can significantly reduce negative mood and anxiety. . . . we used a Monet interactive art...
Setting the Thermometer!
This is the season for thermometer debates—the windows open (or close if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere) and in homes and offices people use whatever means at their disposal to get the temperature set...
Adding Water
Water can be a great addition to an interior space—not the random water burbling in through a broken pipe or flooded field—but water in a gently moving desktop fountain or in an aquarium stocked...
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