Nature makes us more sociable!
Arbuthnott learned via a literature review that “Nature exposure increases prosocial behavior, decreases antisocial behavior, and increases ratings of social connection and satisfaction. Prosocial and antisocial behavior effects are observed with brief nature exposure,...
Why is gardening good for you?
Lehberger and Sparke’s work confirms that gardening is good for our mental health. They “replicated a study conducted in 2020 in Germany, which focused on comparing garden owners and non-garden owners. Almost exactly one...
Is Traffic Noise knocking out your Smartness?
Researchers have determined that “as little as 40 decibels of traffic noise – the typical level of background noise in an office environment or kitchen – has a detrimental effect on cognitive performance. Researchers...
Barbie Pink!
With the global PR tsunami pushing people into theatres to see the new Barbie movie, it seems that the colour pink is everywhere. Looking at relatively unsaturated, light shades of pink is definitely relaxing...
Nature vs Malls – places and thinking
Scherz and colleagues found that people have different sorts of thoughts about other people and about places in different sorts of public spaces. The researchers determined that “Self-related thoughts were less likely in a...
Using Wood in Offices
Ojala and colleagues share that they gathered data “in two rooms: a room with wooden elements and a control room without wood. The participants first performed cognitive tasks by the computer to imitate typical...
Add trees and sky for Creativity
Sharam, Mayer, and Baumann determined that a “nature-view condition [ability to see trees and blue sky] had a significant positive effect on creative fluency (i.e. quantity of output) but not on the quality of...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Don’t always Follow Trends…
A lot of people make a lot of money creating and publicising trends, in design and elsewhere. They’d like you to think that your only option as a rational human being is to follow...
Sounds Good!
When our ears are happy, the odds get pretty good that the rest of us is as well. What can you do to create an acoustic haven? Keep echoes down.Echoing stresses us out. Use...
Speaking and Designing
It may not seem that the language we’re speaking should have much effect on our responses to designed spaces but indeed it does. We pick up on social cues such as the language being...
Garden!
Fjaestad and team’s work confirms the value of gardening; they learned via data gathered from people 46 to 80 years old that “Compared to participants who did not engage in gardening, those who gardened...
Why Objects Matter
Sharfenberger and associates determined that “being physically close to objects helps consumers to feel psychologically close to the more abstract meaning of these objects. Four experimental studies . . . indicate that being proximal...
Closer Greenspace Less Likelihood of Postpartum Depression
Sun and colleagues found that “A reduced risk for PPD [postpartum depression was associated with total green space exposure based on street-view measure [500 m buffer. . .], but not NDVI [normalized difference vegetation...
Living Your Best Life in a Small Space – Intro
Living small is living thoughtfully. You may be living small for all sorts of reasons, but it’s unlikely that you’re doing so by mistake. To actually live and work in a small space, and...
Living Green in a Small Space
Why you or someone you care about has decided to live in a tiny home influences what you can do to make living in one a pleasant experience. Some of the reasons that people...
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