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,...
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...
Managing your at-work Energy Levels…
A Zhang-lead team found “a time allocation effect, such that for a given period of the workday (i.e., the morning or the afternoon), the greater the proportion of time a knowledge worker spent in...
More Benefits of Feeling Awed
We can be awed by design in a variety of ways, for example, via exquisite workmanship or use of unique or special materials. Prade and Saraglou share that “Given that awe experiences promote collective...
Asleep at your Desk?
Goel and colleagues report that “Data from 225 office workers were collected for perceived fatigue, perceived sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index [PSQI]), physiological stress response (standard deviation of heart rate variability [HRV]), and...
More on At-Home Distractions…
Bergefurt and colleagues determined that “Previous research showed that office workers are mainly distracted by noise, influencing their mental health. . . . at home, employees were distracted by noise and when having a...
Dressing for Work
Kim, Holtz, and Vogel report that “the results of a 10-day field study of employees from four organizations generally supported our predictions, showing that daily clothing aesthetics and uniqueness had effects on state self-esteem...
Designing for Mental Health – The Long Read
Every day is not a good day, no matter what colour you paint the walls in your office and regardless of the pattern and texture of your entryway rug. The design of the places...
Why and How you need to manage your AirCon!
The heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that keep your home from being a scorching desert in the summer and a desolate tundra in the winter can make you a happier, healthier person,...
Lessons Learned During the Pandemic
Lots of environmental psychology research was conducted during the pandemic and investigators largely confirmed findings from previous studies. Data collected during the pandemic, mainly during 2020 and 2021, verified that: Ventilation has a significant...
Thinking while Standing
Bhat and associates report that “The present study investigated the effects of attending lectures in sitting and standing postures on executive function of young adults. . . . Attending a lecture in a standing...
Seeing, Hearing birds
Hammond and team studied implications of seeing or hearing birds. They “used the Urban Mind smartphone application to examine the impact of seeing or hearing birds on self-reported mental wellbeing in real-life contexts. A sample...
Managing Office Temperatures
Research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) “found no evidence for a relationship between temperature and work performance within the range temperatures commonly found in office buildings, and certainly...
Positive Effects of At-Work Nature
Loder and Stoner reviewed studies related to nature (for example, plants, nature views) in workplaces. They report, for example, that “Research has shown that contact with nature can improve task performance, usually through increased...
Developers are swapping to Wood
Regularly, the Space Doctors discuss the psychological benefits of being able to see at least some wood grain. A recent article indicates that wood is currently finding its ways into lots of design solutions...
Picking Patterns
Just as the season for painting inside may be ending, so is the one for hanging wallpapers. Science can tell us a lot about which patterns are best on walls and what researchers have...
Online IRL trials
Abrams writes about online trials; her work indicates factors that legal professionals feel are important in physical courtrooms. Courtrooms “tend to feel grand and formal, bedecked with wood panelling, an American flag, and security...
How your office looks affects employment choices!
Ronda and de Gracia report that “aesthetic attributes in the workplace can be equally important in the decision-making process as non-aesthetic attributes and that aesthetic attributes deliver as much utility as non-aesthetic attributes in...
The Difference Face-to-Face Meetings have on us
Gellisch and teammates report that “To examine the implications of the transition from face-to-face to online learning from a psychobiological perspective, this study investigated potential differences in physiological stress parameters of students engaged in...
Co-Working Space and Knowledge Spillovers
Roche and colleagues report that they “examine[d] the influence of physical proximity on between-firm knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology co-working hubs in the United States. Relying on the random assignment of...
Designing for Bonding
Design can influence the bonds we form with other people, just as it can affect how attached we feel to a space. We’ll form more positive and lasting attachments to other people in certain...
Moving beyond Bonding to Trusting
Design can make it more likely that people trust each other in few very concrete ways: Design that eradicates bad moods will lay a strong foundation on which trust in others can build. Designing...
Do we zoom creativity out of us?
Brucks and Levav investigated creativity during Zoom-type sessions. They found via a lab study (involving participants worldwide) and a field study that “videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas. By contrast, when it comes...
Window views
Buying or building a home or planning to move? If you answered yes, you’ll be intrigued by Chamilothori and teammates’ findings about how the openings (windows) in a building’s façade influence in-structure experiences. Via...
Nature Soundscapes help us focus and more…
In a recent study “EEG and Heart Rate data were recorded from 10 participants within an [real-world] office in London. Each participant listened to a Moodsonic Soundscape (lapping lake waves) . . . and...
Headphones and Privacy
Mueller and colleagues share that “Office workers lately use active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones to improve the acoustic situation by blocking unwanted sound. . . . Two studies were conducted to examine if ANC headphones...
Views outside help prevent us from getting lost…
New research confirms that being able to see outside as we travel through a building helps us keep from getting lost. Qi, Lu, and Chen report that “General hospitals in China always present significant...
The Way we Work Now…
Megan Tatum has written an interesting article for the BBC online about the importance of aligning workplace options with user mindsets (“The People Who Hate Working from Home,” 2022, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220616-the-people-who-hate-working-from-home). Tatum’s article is written...
Plants = meditation
Researchers found that looking at plants and guided meditation have similar effects on our mental state. Archary and Thatcher, investigating recovery from mental fatigue (which also degraded mood) found that “distress significantly decreased for...
Circadian lighting and sleep
Benedetti and colleagues found that circadian lighting in offices can improve how well people sleep at night. They “tested the effects of optimized dynamic daylight and electric lighting on circadian phase of melatonin, cortisol...
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