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...
More than what’s in your wine glass…
Professor Joy (I am not making this up!) and team from the University of British Columbia assessed “a number of items including the material features of the winery and the sensorial theme, such as...
Nature and Mood
Bardhan and teammates report that they “conducted one of the first longer-term investigations of daily nature exposure and mood with a mobile app as part of the NatureDose™ Student Study (NDSS). The NatureDose™ app...
ASMR and Biophilia
Mahady, Takac, and De Foe report that “Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a nascent phenomenon wherein a pleasant and relaxing tingling sensation occurs in response to audio and visual triggers like whispering and...
We hear silence…
Silence is not simply the absence of sound; we actively hear it. Goh, Phillips, and Firestone found that “silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions. Seven experiments introduce three ‘silence illusions,’ adapted...
Yummy scents and then bang goes the diet! The lasting smell of temptation!
Chae, Yoon, Baskin and Zhu link smells and food consumed, studying “the effects of indulgent food scents [the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking, for example] on preference for indulgent food items. . . ....
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Power Scenting!
One of the most often bemoaned side effects of COVID-19 was loss of sense of smell. Why? Because smelling the world around us has a powerful effect on our wellbeing, how we think and...
Ventilating a Space!
You may or may not have much control over the ventilation where you live or work, you may be able to open or close a window or be able to change the flow rate...
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...
Block out Traffic Noise
Block Out Traffic Noise Huang and colleagues’ work confirms the value of soundproofing in-town residential walls. The researchers report that “Road traffic noise was estimated at baseline residential address using the common noise assessment...
Minimalistic Living
There’s a lot of push today for living in a minimalist way. Aaargh! Using resources thoughtfully is always a good idea, for many a reason, from saving the earth, to conserving your bank balance,...
Birdsong and Wellbeing
Hammoud and colleagues report that 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. . . . Everyday encounters with...
Language and Judgements
Rizzo and team’s work indicates how important word choice is for conclusions drawn; they found that “sensory language (e.g., words like ‘crumble’ and ‘juicy’ that engage the senses) shapes consumer responses to influencer-sponsored content....
Create Refreshing Views – Garden Design 101!
We’re not apt to think how our gardens can work for us, the way our home offices and kitchens do. Your garden can refresh your mind and cut your stress levels just as it...
Biophilically Designed Gardens
The gardens that have the most positive effects on our minds and our bodies actively apply important principles of biophilic design. We have discussed biophilic design in detail in here (and search in our...
What to hear in your Garden?
Listening to just the right sorts of nature sounds can be as cognitively refreshing and good at reducing our stress levels as seeing nature, in real life or in photos or videos, all of...
Smelling the right Smells outdoors
Gardens can be planned so that the scents that they generate serve well those that smell them. From a psychological perspective the best scents for your garden to produce (also, the best garden-based scents...
Sights and Sounds Interrelated!
Isaacson and team fount that when study participants “asked to choose one of three realistic or abstract paintings, evaluate their perceptual characteristics on five semantic differential rating scales and answer three questions. The participants...
How to Live in a City
Once you get yourself to the city, renting or buying a place, you have to spend time living there. But humans developed into their current forms living in nature. Over the aeons our brains...
More on Nature Benefits!
Phillips and colleagues report on experiences during the COVID pandemic: “we examine which types of nature engagement (i.e. with nearby nature, through nature excursions and media-based) are more strongly associated with well-being. . ....
Green Spaces and Medicine
Turunen and colleagues link green and blue spaces and quality-of-life: “associations of the amounts of residential green and blue spaces within 1 km radius around the respondent’s home (based on the Urban Atlas 2012),...
The Smell of Lockdown…
Allen probed experiences in New Zealand during COVID-19-related lockdowns and found that “changes in suburban smells signal disruption to daily life as a result of the government’s social and economic pandemic-response measures. For instance,...
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