Whether you’ll be spending the end-of-the-year holidays in a cozy log cabin nestled into a snowy forest or in your suburban family room you’re probably interested in making sure your space is welcoming and deeply relaxing, helping you stock up mental energy reserves to help you effectively deal with the challenges of the new year. You’ve also probably been hearing about “hygge” for years, and know that it has something to do with Scandinavians making the most of the many months they’re confined indoors—but you still wonder—what is hygge and how can I apply it? Even though hygge (pronounce HOO-gah) seems all warm and fuzzy and something some Danes and Swedes dreamed up when snowed in on some long winter night (and maybe it was) its core tenets are supported by neuroscience research. Warm, slightly dimmer light (as from, for example, candles and fireplaces, perhaps) is a core principle, nearly indispensable for hygge.  In multiple articles, for example here, LINK we’ve discussed how relaxing humans find being in this sort of lighting and how it has tied to, for example, creativity and also to getting along better with other people (which sometimes requires more than just a little cleverness).  This…

As we spend time together at the end of the year, in the sort of log cabin retreat that’s featured in many a holiday movie, a sleek modern ski hotel, or our own living room, we can start to feel that we need a little space of our own, physically and mentally. Humans and groups, such as families or work teams, need to feel that they have a space that’s theirs, where they can have at least some control over what happens. They’ll often mark their territory in some way, adding things to it that send messages to visitors (and the owners themselves) about ideas that the owner values—for example, commendations for great performance indicate that an employee values doing their job well. When people, alone and in clearly defined groups such as immediate family members, have a territory they are less stressed and their minds therefore can work more effectively, whether they’re trying to resolve some complicated issue or figure out what they should talk about with the person who will soon be sitting across the table from them or who is already there (gasp!) and sharing the holiday goose because they are part of the same nuclear family….

What’s the neuroscience of effective tablescaping?  There are so many scents and textures linked to end-of-season meals, ones that are a given and not negotiable (for example, in the US even though no one ever eats the fruitcake it is often on hand), that only a few of the experiences that people will experience as they eat are up for modification—but here are some ideas about how to develop holiday dining experiences (holiday meals are often not big on healthy eating, but if you want to design for that, read this article.) LINK Science shows that: People are indeed more likely to participate in a conversation when there is no clear leader, in other words when there is no one sitting at one of the short ends of a rectangular table.Your kindergarten teacher was correct in promoting circular sitting.  Round tables that seat the same number of people as a rectangular one are much larger and can be hard to fit into many dining areas—so people often go with rectangular when they’d like to be circular.  A solution: remove the chairs from the short sides of rectangular tables. People interact with those they can see, so size table decorations accordingly….

At the end of the year, people from different cultures, otherwise dispersed sets of friends, for example, find themselves in the same place at the same time.  As people from different cultures gather, keep in mind: People from more individualistic cultures expect more privacy and are not as good at sharing (bathrooms, audio systems, etc.) as people from collectivistic ones. People from more individualistic cultures also more likely to want to, and to actually, change spaces by moving furniture etc., than those raised in collectivistic cultures. People from some cultures are more interested in their wellbeing while in a space, e.g., for example, being able to relax, than others, who can be more attuned to developing a space which sacrifices wellbeing to do some task well—for example, apportioning kitchen spaces to efficiently cook meals as opposed to allowing for tension free gatherings. Cultures can also vary in their support for novel design options, just as concern about cleanliness (and even definitions of cleanliness) can vary from one area to another.

Researchers have a concept, that can be handy to apply in the real world although it rarely is.  It’s the idea of behaviour settings. When scientists talk about behaviour settings, they’re using a single term to refer to both the physical environment and human thoughts and behaviours in that area, one term to include the idea of what’s going on where. When we want to encourage people to act in particular ways, if we bring up reminders of where they do do whatever is desired, the actions wanted become more likely as behaviour setting research indicates the frequency with which actions are tied to elements of places. An example: even in today’s electronics heavy worlds, people know that when they’re in a library it’s expected that they’ll respect the needs of others to concentrate and will therefore speak in hushed tones or not at all, give people space/keep up interaction deferring zones around each other, avoid stressing others out by tapping our pencil on the tabletop, etc. We link all of those behaviours, the speaking quietly, etc., to libraries and locations that bring libraries to mind will bring out the same behaviours in us.  If in our part of the…

Gray, Tracey, and Pigott report findings consistent with those of previous researchers: “Community gardening is a successful social and nature prescription intervention. Community gardening improves health, wellbeing and community connectedness. Community gardening reduces vulnerability by increasing social cohesion and safety. Social housing design needs to include restorative and regenerative green spaces. Policies for social housing should include community gardening projects. . . . Statistically significant improvements were found in participants’ satisfaction with personal wellbeing, health, and community connectedness; as well as increased gardening skills, positive social experiences, and time spent in nature. . . . participant’s engagement with gardening was restorative and regenerative. . . . Community gardening was shown to amplify civic pride and bolster community resilience.” Tonia Gray, Danielle Tracey, and Fiona Pigott.  2024. “Restorative and Regenerative Green Spaces for Vulnerable Communities in Social Housing: The Impact of a Community Greening Program.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 99, 102448, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102448

Zhao and colleagues found via a literature review that “studies generally reported beneficial associations between having indoor plants and mental health, such as reducing stress, depressive symptoms, and negative emotions. . . . In general, favourable effects of indoor plants are supported.” Tianyu Zhao, Iana Markevych, Dorota Buczytowska, Marcel Romanos, and Joachim Heinrich.  2023. “When Green Enters a Room: A Scoping Review of Epidemiological Studies on Indoor Plants and Mental Health.” Environmental Research, vol. 216, part 3, 114715, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114715

Frezza lead a team that found via a literature review “that the simple act of listening to music after surgery, whether with headphones or through a speaker, had noticeable effects on patients during their recovery period: Lower pain levels: Patients who listened to music had a statistically significant reduction in pain the day after surgery. . . . Reduced anxiety levels: Across all the analyzed studies, patient self-reported anxiety levels were reduced. . . . Less opioid use: Patients who listened to music used less than half of the amount of morphine compared to those who did not listen to music on the first day after surgery. . . . Lower heart rate: Patients who listened to music experienced a reduced heart rate (around 4.5 fewer beats per minute) compared with patients who did not listen to music . . . keeping a patient’s heart rate within a healthy range helps improve recovery.” The researchers recommend patients listen to music they enjoy and do not “prescribe” any particular type/style. “Listening to Music May Speed Up Recovery from Surgery.” 2024.  Press release, American College of Surgeons, https://www.facs.org/media-center/press-releases/2024/listening-to-music-may-speed-up-recovery-from-surgery/

Chopik and associates report that “Recent research and polling suggest that people may be more reluctant to express themselves and stand out than in previous years. . . . We examined changes in need for uniqueness among 1,339,160 Internet respondents . . . from 2000 and 2020. Across the 20-year period, participants who completed the survey more recently reported a lower need for uniqueness, particularly in terms of not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums and caring more about what others think about them.” William Chopik, Kim Gotschi, Alejandro Carrillo, Rebekka Weidmann, and Jeff Potter. 2024. “Changes in Need for Uniqueness from 2000 to 2020.” Collabra: Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, 121937, https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.121937

Latreille, Houle, and Coulombe interviewed people 14-20 living in public housing: “Many of the participants in our study mentioned the positive or negative influence . . . of having or not having their own room. Studies have shown how important a private room can be for young people in terms of residential satisfaction . . . their self-esteem . . . their ability to cope with school stress . . . and achieving their personal goals. . . . Our study [confirms the] negative impact of overcrowding, a phenomenon known to adversely affect young people’s academic performance . . . [it] prevents young people from concentrating on their school projects due to a lack of privacy. . . . social housing that does not allow access to a personal space (one’s own room) could hinder the positive development of young people (e.g., identity development).” Jeremie Latreille, Janie Houle, and Simon Coulombe. “The Influence of the Residential Environment on Well-Being and Personal Projects: Perspectives of Young People Living in Public Housing.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102407

Humans relish sparkly things, ones that shine. Whether as little bits of glitter or wall sized mirrors, things that reflect light are things humans like. (Although I do have to complain about glitter in food—whether intentionally placed or just coincidentally present after it is thrown into the air—not a good thing). Sparkle needs light, and we’ve discussed lighting to achieve desired ways of thinking and acting here. The top line summary of what’s at the linked-to article: • Dimmer warmer light is best for mingling pleasantly with others and thinking creatively while brighter cooler light is the way to go when trying to spur action and concentration generally. • People are more apt of act honestly and healthfully (e.g., select healthy options from the options you’ve provided) when lights are brighter. Want people to do what society expects of them? Turn on more lights! • Having warm and cool lights on in the same space at the same time creates a sort of “muddy” atmosphere, not quite one thing or another, so try to use just warm lights or cool ones at any one time. • To have their intended effects, it’s great if warmer lights are placed in tabletop…

Awed humans do all sorts of good things. Shiny things can be awe inspiring, along with a slew of other designed elements. We are awed not only by large size (think: the inside of a Gothic cathedral), but also through the use of exotic or unusual or hard-to-utilize materials, positively intriguing technology, and exceptional workmanship, for instance. Happily, the same thing can awe us over and over again—it’s far from a once-and-done effect. Why bother to awe? When people experience awe and after they do so, they: • Feel less stressed and mentally less tired • Process cognitive information more effectively • Think more creatively • Really seem to follow the Golden Rule, treating other people nicely and as they themselves would no doubt wish to be treated • Are more curious, particularly about whatever has made them feel awed—if they seem awe inspiring art, they’re more curious about art, for instance. • Are more open-minded • Feel less rushed and are less impatient

At this time of year, when it is becoming harder and harder to find a nicely warm, sunny day to go outside for a walk, it’s important to keep in mind all of our various options to mentally refresh, after cognitively exhausting ourselves, doing work that requires mental focus, for example. As discussed in this article, whomever we are we are mentally refreshed, for example, via: • Nature views—particularly when that nature includes green plants, trees, and gently curving paths of the sort we might find in a British or North American meadow on a lovely spring day. These views should seem readily accessible, not separated from us by a hedge, for example, and can even include a few scattered human elements, such as a boat in the distance, and a tree we could scamper up, or some other way to avoid any danger that might approach. • Art that depicts the same sort of nature views that revitalize us, whether it is a painting or photograph or a sculpture, still or moving, realistic or reduced to its fractal dimensions, is just as refreshing as a nature view. • Green leafy plants inside buildings. • Water features (with slow peacefully…

Change can be difficult, particularly during months when we’re more confined to our homes and offices without convenient escapes when we can’t stand the dust and chaos of changing our worlds any longer. Don’t hesitate to make changes to your world however when you: – Can’t effectively do the things that are important to you as a person—whether that means revamping your office to succeed at your job or soundproofing a closet so you can practice your cello without disturbing your neighbours. – Feel like you’re losing control over your ability to live the life you’ve chosen—this may mean chipping off old paint so you can open windows to let in fresh air, reorganizing your kitchen so making lunch for your kids proceeds smoothly, or changing out a shower head so you can, when you choose, get an in-shower massage. – Don’t feel you can socialize with others when you want to how you want to If the places where you spend time don’t support your efforts to succeed at doing things that are important to you, feel in control of your life, and socialize with others as you wish, changes are in order regardless of the season.

When the holidays approach, our places can start to seem visually cluttered—and sometimes this leads to a little voice in our heads suggesting we get rid of books. Unloading a few books that haven’t been important to us, donating them to the Salvation Army, hospital libraries, etc., may be in order—but don’t part with books that have had a meaningful effect on how you’ve thought and lived unless you must (and a must situation in this case is truly severe, for instance, you are downsizing to a place where there will literally be no place, on bookshelves or elsewhere, for your books). One of the prime reasons for keeping any books that relate to your profession is that we learn more effectively from books that we hold in our hands than from online texts, and we also remember more of what we’ve read from those in-paper books also. Books that you’ve marked up in some way as you’ve learned are also stocked with the clues that will help you refresh your knowledge of important principles when you need them again—you may have forgotten lots of things about how to do a factor analysis, but if you open up the related…

A static space is alien to us and, over time, makes us tense. Have you ever been in a meadow on a lovely spring day when there wasn’t even the tiniest current of moving air or water. Exactly. Case closed. An important principle of biophilic design is including gently moving something or others into the areas where we’re spending time. From a psychological perspective it doesn’t matter too much to us what’s moving as long as its fundamentally benign. Yes to swaying grasses and burbling streams, no to tigers sneaking through bushes, for instance. This means people will be calmed, de-stressed, and refreshed if a wall hanging or the sheer curtains move a little bit in the streams of the HVAC, water bubbles up from the floor of a fish tank, a mobile suspended overhead sways slightly as people walk nearby, a fern front bobs around for a while after a person or a pet pushes past it, the shadow of a branch blowing in the wind outside dances across the carpet—you get the idea. It’s really important that the motion you add is peaceful and pleasant. Anything reminiscent of hurricanes (for example, shadows that are whipping wildly back and…

Way, way too often when we’re pulling a space together we think only about what it will look like when we’re done—as if we don’t have ears, nose, and skin that will be in the place we’re developing along with our eyes. Most of us are more visually oriented than attuned to what we hear, smell, or feel, but we do (at least most of us do) still hear, smell, and feel in whatever sort of place we find ourselves so to ignore how it will sound, etc., in a space we’re developing is a big no-no. The key concept here is not to add a design element that comes along with unwanted baggage. A marble floor can look great but sound terrible if it leads to an echo that makes us feel mad (until we find enough thick padded paper to create walkways on that marble that we eliminate the echo and make a terrible eyesore). The natural fiber hanging that adds a beautifully undulating and relaxing curvilinear element to the sitting room will drive us from the area for the next six months if that’s how long it takes for it to finish off-gassing and settle into a…

As the days get cooler you probably survey your garden with a heavy heart. You know, like Solomon, you will have to make some difficult decisions soon. Which plants should you save from becoming crispy, frosted husks of their former selves? The plants that pack the largest psychological wallop are the ones that will do you the most good, psychologically, they’ll be your best pals, as you work to make it through another cold season. If all can’t be saved and some priorities need to be set, move the greenest, leafiest, curviest plants to the front of the pack- ones that look like some sort of Ficus (although they are unlikely to actually be a Ficus); Ficus leaves are pretty curvy, as are Ficus stems, and Ficuses are reliably green (although every living thing does need care at least every so often). Leave those that are spike-y or don’t seem like they could have a place in an upbeat children’s cartoon to fend for themselves as days get colder. And if you don’t have a garden and therefore lack anything at all to save? Go plastic. Good plastic that looks so real you need to reach out and touch it…

We’re used to thinking that natural light is magical, something we can’t get too much of—it elevates our mood (for more on reasons to design to encourage good moods, read this article) and makes sure our brain is purring along in tip top fashion. Daylighting boosts our mental and physical wellbeing and performance—but, like most things in life even the bestiest best stuff can’t be used recklessly. Things to think about as you design that new home with only glass walls or truck your curtains to Goodwill are: • Temperature. In many parts of the world, lots and lots of natural light in a space can mean lots of heat in an area (if windows are not insulated it can mean lots of low temperatures also). When temperatures are not what we find pleasant we are stressed and when we’re stressed we’re distracted from whatever we’re up to, whether that’s writing a report for work or needlepointing or trying to get children to stop fighting. When stressed we also don’t get along as well with others as we do when we’re not feeling tense. Also, when we’re hot our perceptions of whatever physical environment we’re in will fall; for example,…

Lots of us are up at all sorts of hours. Our days get turned topsy-turvy because, since we now all work all day as we can work anywhere, we get a call from a colleague on another continent at 3 am (sometimes the apologies for these calls are a lot more heartfelt and apparently sincere than other times). Or a baby decides it has nothing better to do at 2 am than to cry and cry and cry. Or we formally agree to work through the night, taking our turn covering patient care between dusk and dawn, or we (surprise!) find ourselves needing to keep working away (occasionally this is actually a good thing, maybe we get on a role as we do our taxes or write the conclusion to our novel and decide to keep plowing away until things are done). For all of these potential reasons, and many more, it’s great if the places where we spend our time have some sort of circadian lighting. Circadian lighting (described in technical detail here and at articles linked at this website: https://www.gsa.gov/governmentwide-initiatives/federal-highperformance-green-buildings/resource-library/health/circadian-light-for-your-health) is artificial light that mimics the sort of natural light that’ll be present outdoors at any time. When…

When in doubt, whether you’re standing in front of a display at a home improvement store or a furniture shop, the best option, materials wise, is always the natural one. Wood, stone, wool, and cotton, for example, have a better effect on how your brain works and how calm/unstressed you feel that plastics and polyesters, for example. When we’re near natural materials our brains process incoming information more effectively and we feel calmer—this is one of the central tenets of biophilic design and has been confirmed by study after scientific study, in labs and in the actual real world. Much of the research done with natural materials has been done with wood, and particularly with wood whose grain is visible. Research shows that seeing the grain specifically has all sorts of benefits mood and mental performance-wise, so, sorry, ebony with its dark, dark finish isn’t the way to go. Scientists have learned that the best wood finishes of all, from a brain perspective, are those that are warmer, for example, oak. Seeing wood grain can lower blood pressure and heart rates and stress while elevating mental performance in general and also creativity. Too much wood can definitely be, well too…

Stacey Freed writes about firms’ efforts to encourage people to work onsite by making those sites oases of pleasure, really resorts for working. It remains to be seen if these attempts at “hotelification,” which likely transmit the nonverbal message that work is “fun” and doesn’t need to be taken too seriously, are successful long term. Freed (2024, “The Hotelification of Offices, With Signature Scents and Saltwater Spas,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/business/office-design-work-resort.html) shares that “With an office vacancy rate of about 20 percent in the United States, according to Cushman & Wakefield, downtown business districts are trying whatever they can to get workers back — including resort-like work spaces that match or surpass the comfort of their homes.” “Office Hotels” profiled included custom scents, upscale restaurants, swimming pools, outdoor workspaces (hurray for sunshine!), high-end golf simulators, meditation pods, onsite registered dieticians, saunas, and upscale grocery stores.

“Brat” an album released by Charli XCX has made one particularly intense green the colour of the summer. Callie Holterman (2024, “You Can’t Escape This Color,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/style/what-is-brat-green.html ) has written a profile of this energizing shade. She reports that it is “Not just any green, but a hue so affronting that fashion news media has described it as “noxious,” “abrasive” and the colour of “bilious sludge.” Picture Gumby with jaundice.” The colour tends toward the sort of yellow-yellow-green that is unpopular worldwide. For more information on the psychological implications of seeing different colours, with varying saturations, brightnesses, and hues, read these articles.

People reports on what’s new in dorm room design and their article is pretty stunning, and not necessarily in a good way – many neuroscience-based design rules are broken, from creating spaces that are too energizing to study in to so visually complex that stress is a certainty—but how much time are people likely to spend in these rooms with the lights, on, studying or doing anything else anyway? Take a look for yourself at https://people.com/inside-the-world-of-parent-led-dorm-design-where-college-move-in-day-costs-5k-exclusive-8698289

Humans are even more interesting creatures than you might have thought. Wenger and teammates report that “People can use their sense of hearing for discerning thermal properties, though they are for the most part unaware that they can do so. While people unequivocally claim that they cannot perceive the temperature of pouring water through the auditory properties of hearing it being poured, our research further strengthens the understanding that they can. This multimodal ability is implicitly acquired in humans, likely through perceptual learning over the lifetime of exposure to the differences in the physical attributes of pouring water.” Mohr Wenger, Amber Maimon, Or Yizhar, Adi Snir, Yonatan Sasson, and Amir Amedi. 2024. Hearing Temperatures: Employing Machine Learning for Elucidating the Cross-Modal Perception of Thermal Properties Through Audition.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1353490

Terblanche and Khumalo investigated studying on university campuses via a survey of user and report that “The objective of this study is to determine how biophilic designs in study areas affect the productivity of students at the University of the Witwatersrand. The study also seeks to evaluate study areas at Wits in terms of biophilic design, determine whether biophilic design contributes to the preference of students and their study productivity. . . . Five study areas were identified and evaluated in terms of biophilic design. . . . The students prefer to study in biophilic study areas as it prompts positive emotions and make them feel rejuvenated and energized. However, there are still students studying in the non-biophilic areas due to convenience or due to the biophilic areas that are noisy and lacks monitoring.” Rolien Terblanche and Dorcas Khumalo. “The Impact of Biophilic Design in University Study Areas on Students’ Productivity.” Archnet-IJAR, in press, https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-10-2023-0288

Suresh and colleagues confirm that people are more creative in biophilically designed offices: “Biophilia Index has shown a significant positive correlation and a strong predictive value for creativity of employees. . . . [data collected by the Suresh-lead team] indicate that employee creativity and its dimensions are comparatively higher in the group with high biophilic index than the group with low biophilic index. These findings emphasize the significance of integrating nature-inspired design features in workplaces to augment creativity. . . . The results revealed that biophilic index has a substantial positive correlation and predictive value for employee creativity and its dimensions, meaning employees are more creative when the biophilic index is higher.” A biophilic index score reflects the presence or absence of natural light, natural fractals, curves, water (seen and/or heard), plants, and representations of nature, etc. Sandra Suresh, Dharmendra Kumar-Singh, and Narshingh Kumar. 2024. “Exploring the Influence of Biophilic Workplace Design on Employee Creativity: A Comparative Study.” International Journal of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, vol. 50, https://doi.org/10.55863/ijees.2024.0166

Yildirim and colleagues gathered data in multisensory virtual reality simulations of an actual workplace: “the multisensory biophilic workplace significantly improved cognitive performance, reduced stress levels, and enhanced mood states compared to the non-biophilic one. There was a statistically significant association between the sense of smell and restorative benefits. Although visual elements emerged as the primary means of creating restorative workplace environments, our results suggest that the sense of smell plays a significant role in the restoration process.” Biophilic areas contained “indoor and outdoor greenery, dynamic lighting, natural colours and materials, biomorphic forms, and nature-inspired photographs, to depict the conditions of the multisensory biophilic scenario.” The scent used included several odors found in nature, including the smells of the beach/oceans, forests, grasses/flowers, citrus plants, and wood. Nature sounds (such as, birds singing, ocean waves, rustling vegetation) were included in the biophilic condition; in the non-biophilic one typical office sounds, such as conversations and printers operating, were featured. Users could select from among several choices for each biophilic design element. The researchers recommend aligning scents with planned activities; “energizing scents (e.g., peppermint, rosemary, citrus) can be utilized in places that require creativity, critical thinking or problem-solving, whereas calming scents (e.g., lavender, jasmine,…

A recent article in The New York Times (Juan Ramirez, 2024, “The Broadway Actor Who Designs Dressing Rooms Inspired by Her Characters,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/t-magazine/krysta-rodriguez-dressing-room-design.html ) focuses on dressing rooms created by an actress to reflect the personalities of the characters she’s playing. Krysta Rodriguez creates spaces where her character would be comfortable “even if it’s not my [her] personal style.” Rodriguez adds that “’My design and renovation work relates so much to my acting,’ Rodriguez says. In both cases, ‘you want to figure out who this person is and what experiences have made them who they are.’ Unlike a primary home, she adds, dressing rooms don’t have to be functional; they just need to provide respite.” For information on designing for actual, real world personalities, read this article.

Chen, Ma, Xiao, and Qin y report that field and lab research “showed that circular (vs. angular) shapes of new products decreased perceived learning costs, which, in turn, enhanced consumer innovation adoption intentions. . . . For products positioned for ease of use, circular shapes are likely to be more appealing, whereas for products positioned for capability an angular design would be more advantageous. . . . our findings also applies to service designs. One area of service design that could potentially benefit from our findings is the design of tangible elements of the service environment. For services associated with high learning costs, for example, a math tutoring outlet for beginners and incorporating circular objects in the service environment would help alleviate the perceived learning costs of clients and nudge prospective customers to try the service. Similarly, managers of such service venues should avoid placing angular objects in their interior designs.” Tong Chen, Zhenfeng Ma, Meizhen Xiao, and Ping Qin. 2024. “Be Careful of the Sharp Edges! How and Why Circular Versus Angular Shapes Influence Consumer Adoption of New Products.” Journal of Business Research, vol. 183, 114817, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114817

Min, Liu, and Anderson found that “Brands and retailers often offer different aesthetic versions of the same base product that vary from visually simple to visually complex. . . . Consumers associate simple (vs. complex) visual aesthetics with lower production costs when evaluating different aesthetic versions of a product. . . . An important downstream implication of this lay belief is that consumers’ willingness to pay is lower for visually simple (vs. complex) versions. This gap in willingness to pay occurs even when consumers like both product versions or aesthetics equally, and it is only eliminated when consumers like the visually simple version substantially more than the complex version. Finally, reducing the diagnosticity of the lay belief by disclosing information that the two versions took similar amounts of production time and effort reduces the gap in willingness to pay between visually simple (vs. complex) versions.” Lauren Min, Peggy Liu, and Cary Anderson. “The Visual Complexity = Higher Production Cost Lay Belief.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae044

Lv focuses on the “recent proliferation of ‘metaverse’ virtual worlds, where tech companies are investing billions to create hyper-realistic digital environments, including simulated natural landscapes. . . . these virtual ecosystems risk perpetuating a commodified and sanitized portrayal of nature, devoid of the unpredictability, risk, and spontaneity that shape our evolutionary connection to the living world. Overreliance on such curated experiences among younger generations could inadvertently reinforce environmental generational amnesia, where each successive cohort becomes further detached from the authentic complexities and challenges of Earth’s biosphere.” David Lv. “The Commodification of Nature: How Virtual Nature Could Reinforce Environmental Generational Amnesia.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102390

People are people and brains are brains wherever they are, so it’s no surprise that colours influence us in predictable ways no matter where we find ourselves. Colour has 3 dimensions, hue, saturation, and brightness. • Hues are sets of shades, light wavelengths; so greens, blues, and purples are all hues. • Saturation is how “greyed-out” a colour seems to be, we could think of this as how pure-unpure a colour is. So, a sage green is less saturated than a Kelly green. Sometimes unsaturated colours are called “soft” or “muted” shades. • Brightness could also be called “lightness,” and it is how much white pigment there seems to be in a colour, with baby blue being lighter than sapphire blue. Over time, cultures come to link particular hues with particular ideas, as we’ll cover in more detail in the next article. For example, for many cultures, the colour blue is linked to the idea of competence, dependability, and trustworthiness, which explains why the logos for so many banks are blue. Research has determined that, worldwide, colours that are less saturated and lighter are more relaxing to look at while those that are more saturated and darker make us more…

Over time, groups of people come to link specific concepts/ideas to certain colours. Sometimes these colour-idea bonds seem to happen almost by decree, for example, when a political party decides to adopt a colour or a colour of a particular thing becomes immediately symbolic (remember when yellow umbrellas were a sign of dissent in Hong Kong?), and other times links build up more naturally and over more time. Not all groups tie the same concepts/ideas to the same colour, so it’s important to spend time with user groups, or, if you’re designing for yourself, ask yourself some very pointed questions, to learn what seeing certain colours may bring to mind. Examples abound of different sorts of associations present in different user groups. For instance, many of us tend to link the colour pink to femininity and blue to masculinity, but that isn’t even true for all European cultures, let alone worldwide. Associations to particular hues identified by particular groups include: • In countries where Europeans make up most of the population the colour white is associated with purity but in East Asia it is the colour of death. • In the US, the colour blue is tied to trustworthiness, dependability,…

Making mingling with others a positive experience requires a lot more than just throwing people into a room together, as anyone who’s ever done just that and watched their party fizzle can confirm. When you’re picking surface colours for places where you’d like people to have a good time hanging out together, be particularly attuned to the associations we form to particular hues, which is discussed in a separate article in this issue. Think at the macro- and micro-levels for colour associations—if most of your guests most of the time are likely to be alums of a particular school, take particular care not to use the team colour of their fiercest competitor in any conspicuous ways in your home, for example. Human beings are quite energized by being in the same place at the same time, so using generally calming, relaxing colours, as described in another article in this issue, is best in places where people will spend time together. Colours that are less saturated and lighter are definitely the best options. Within that mix of colours that are less saturated and lighter, warmer shades (yellows, peaches, etc.) are definitely the best choices. Research has shown that when we see…

In life, we’re almost never in a place with only one surface colour (and if we are, particularly if that colour is white, we’re apt to be so stressed that we’re having a very, very bad day). The effects that any surface colours have on us depend on their saturation and lightness, as discussed in another article in this issue. What have scientists learned about using shades in combinations? • Colour combinations of the same hue will seem more harmonious and pleasing. The same goes for colours with the same saturation levels or saturation levels that are only slightly different. The lighter the shades in a set of colours, the more likely the entire set will seem harmonious as will a collection of colours that differs only in lightness levels. Small lightness differences can, however, reduce the pleasingness of a set of colours. • Depending on the shades involved, analogous colour schemes can be more restful and complementary ones more energizing. Humans who feel more interdependent with other people prefer analogous to complementary collections of colours. Also, people who feel socially excluded (isolated) prefer analogous colour combinations (compared to complementary ones) more than those who don’t feel isolated. Analogous and…

With Winter and Summer comes more time indoors in much of the developed world—and depending on whether you’re in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, Winter/Summer is almost upon us. Spring and Autumn are regularly temperate, pleasant times to spend time outdoors and with the windows open, letting the temperature outside pretty much determine the temperature inside—but often everything changes once Winter and Summer arrive. Temperatures can be too hot or too cold for comfort, and in our world, that means HVAC systems bounce back into action, heating or cooling, as needed. There are lots of factors that determine the best temperature for a space to be. To optimize our ability to analyse information, solve problems, think creatively, etc., the best temperatures for us when we’re awake, the place to set the thermostat is 70 to 72 degrees with relative humidity of from 40 to 70%. Room temperatures of about 65 degrees work well for people sleeping. If we’re being active, a cooler temperature can be best, but less-active pursuits, say decompressing in an overstuffed chair with a good book at the end of the day, can be fine toward the upper end of the optimal range. Need help setting a…

Whoever we are, sometimes our lives become more stressful. Whether it’s because we’re returning to our usual lives after a relaxed summer away from our usual challenges or because the weather is getting better after a long not-generally-so-good period and it’s hard to keep life purring right along, sometimes we’re tense. Changing up your physical environment can only do so much for you, it’s not magic, but if life hasn’t seemed it’s calm, usual self recently, but you don’t have time for dramatic redo’s, try: • Adding a green leafy potted plant to the space where you try to relax, but just one, a couple of feet tall or so in view as you sit and seek calm—more create visual clutter. • Which brings us to the second point: Decluttering. Look around and see if there’s more going on visually in the space where you like to relax than in a residential interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Look at a picture of a Frank Lloyd Wright residential interior, specifically the number of colours, patterns, shapes in view, etc., and the apparent order with which they’ve been arranged. Compare what you see and add or remove pillows, tchotchkes on table…

Most of us have ears that work OK most of the time—there’s the occasional ear infection or very bad cold, but that is a passing thing, at least generally. So what’s best to hear as you go about your daily life? • Quiet nature soundtracks do work out the best, for what goes on in our heads and our bodies—so the best sorts of things to hear are gently rustling leaves and grasses, peacefully singing birds, and burbling water. It’s a bonus when you live in the right place and it’s the right time of year and you can open your windows (and your windows can be opened!) to let in these sorts of sounds. If you can’t let nature sounds from outside your house into your home at some times of year, or any times of year, play nature soundscapes available online. • Adding a tabletop fountain, that generates the sounds of serenely flowing water can be a particularly good idea—seeing that moving water is as good for our brains as hearing it! • White noise can be a good substitute for nature sounds if you’ve had a run in with a bear or for some other reason break…

Plants inside can be great—when they’re around our minds and our bodies work well—our cognitive performance and creativity go up, we get along better with other people, our stress levels fall—the list goes on and on. To reap the most benefits from the plants in your world, make sure you include green leafy ones—cactuses and spikey plants just don’t have the psychological payoffs of Ficus plants and other gracefully curving, lushly leafed options. You only want one or two, a few feet tall or so in any view you have across a space—more up visual complexity too much and make you tense. There’s a bonus to using flowing plants, they’re especially good for our psyche when blossoms are present. If you are just not good with plants, don’t despair, artificial plants can work as well as real ones—as long as they’re such good “fakes” that you need to reach out and touch them to see if they’re real or not.

We talk regularly about the best temperatures for our minds (about 70 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (depending on your clothes, what you’re doing, etc.) , with 40 to 70% humidity, as reviewed here), but conditions outdoors frequently deviate from those best-for-our-mental-performance bands. Hence, Dana Smith’s recent article in The New York Times (2024, “How Heat Affects the Brain,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/well/mind/heat-affect-brain-emotions.html) which pretty effectively reviews the consequences of too-hot heads. As she details “High temperatures can have an alarming effects on our bodies, raising the risk for heart attacks, heatstroke and death. . . . But heat also takes a toll on our brains, impairing cognition and making us irritable, impulsive and aggressive. . . . scores on cognitive tests [fall] as scientists raised the temperature in the room. One investigation found that just a four-degree increase — which participants described as still feeling comfortable — led to a 10 percent average drop in performance across tests of memory, reaction time and executive functioning.” The same negative effects ensue when people are in real world classrooms and workplaces and anywhere else they may find themselves, which doesn’t bode well for society as our climate warms.

Humans feel great when they’re in a place that they think conveys who they are and what’s important to them—and also when they’re in spaces that seem to clearly tell other people’s stories—something we’ve discussed in this article, for example. All of that conveying and telling need not involve any actual words, however, as a recent article on topiary animals in people’s front yards makes clear. Isabella Kwai (2024, “You See a Hedge. He Sees Something Else.” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/world/europe/london-hedge-animals-art.html) reviews topiary sculptures that Tim Bushe creates in his front garden and in his neighbours years. She reports that “Mr. Bushe, 70, an art college graduate and architect, has built many things during his long career, from schools and shops to homes and offices. But it may be his mischievous hedges scattered around north London that intrigue the most. ‘I realize how much joy they give,’ said Mr. Bushe, who donates his hedge-cutting earnings to environmental causes. ‘They lift the urban streetscape in a very positive way.’ . . . the journey from flora to faux fauna requires patience, persistence and the luxury of time. Mr. Bushe starts with initial cuts to shape the hedge. Then, it must…

Recently,we’ve gotten access via photographs to two interesting spaces: the chambers of the US Supreme Court (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/27/us/supreme-court-chamber-photos.html) and the room that British royals are in just before they step onto the famous balcony, the one where Charles kissed Diana once and William kissed Kate twice (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn38z155yrpo). Click over to the webpages noted and take a look, applying the information we cover here at The Space Doctors. What do you think about the colours on walls (read this article for more info on surface colours)? The shapes of rooms and their ceiling heights (as discussed here)? The furniture and the way it’s arranged (for more info, look here)? The biophilic design elements present—natural light, natural materials, etc. (biophilic design is discussed in detail here)? You get the idea—put on your design sleuth hat and have some fun!

Tok and colleagues determined that “using the scientific name of a major ingredient enhances product evaluations when the product is perceived as utilitarian, whereas using the common name for that ingredient has a positive impact on product evaluations when the product is perceived as hedonic. . . . using the scientific name for a harmful ingredient that has been removed is more likely to enhance product evaluations than referring to the removed ingredient by its common name.” Dickson Tok, Xi Chen, Chun-Tuan Chang, Xing-Yu Chu. “’Ascorbic Acid’ or ‘Vitamin C?’ When and How Scientifically or Commonly Named Ingredients Enhance Product Evaluations.” Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.22068

Szewranski, Mrowczynska, and van Hoof’s work verifies the value of biophilic design. They share that “the concept of biophilia has made its way into the built environment, for instance, through the introduction of natural elements such as plants, water, natural light and materials into buildings and urban spaces. . . . Remodelling homes to provide views of nature outside the window is becoming increasingly popular as part of the biophilic design approach. . . . Adding balconies or terraces to homes provides direct access to the outdoors . . . The belief that nature is always beautiful and harmonious can affect our ability to recognize threats and the need to protect the environment. . . . Enjoying virtual experiences of nature can weaken our authentic connection to it. . . . [Biophilic design] improves physical and mental health, increases productivity and creativity, and reduces stress. Biophilic spaces foster social interaction, create integrated communities and bring economic benefits, attracting customers and increasing employee satisfaction.” Szymon Szewranski, Maria Mrowczynska, and Joost van Hoof. “Biophilia in Contemporary Design: Navigating Future Opportunities and Challenges.” Indoor and Built Environment, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/1420326X241262626

Wu, Li, and Spence confirm that what people are looking at and what they taste are related: “Compared to the urban condition, perceived aroma, freshness, fruitiness and pleasantness [of samples of orange juice] were rated significantly higher in the nature condition. On the other hand, flavour intensity and sweetness were rated significantly higher in the urban condition than in the natural condition.” Chunmao Wu, Pei Li, and Charles Spence. “Glassware Influences the Perception of Orange Juice in Simulated Naturalistic versus Urban Conditions.” 2024. Multisensory Research, DOI: 10.1163/22134808-bja10126

Prinzing’s work indicates that “green” behaviours and positive moods are related. He describes a study he recently completed: “A 10-day experience-sampling study (7,161 observations from 181 adults in 14 countries, primarily the United States) revealed positive within-person and between-person associations, and a randomized controlled experiment (N = 545 U.S. undergraduates) found that incorporating proenvironmental behavior into individuals’ daily activities increased their experiences of happiness and meaning in life. . . . There was some support for the hypothesis that proenvironmental behavior affects well-being by creating a ‘warm glow.’ But overall the findings align more closely with the hypothesis that proenvironmental behavior helps to satisfy individuals’ basic psychological needs.” Michael Prinzing. “Proenvironmental Behavior Increases Subjective Well-Being: Evidence From an Experience-Sampling Study and a Randomized Experiment.” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241251766

Keivabu and Widmann found that “hot [out of comfort range] days reduce politicians’ language complexity, but not cold days. . . . Our data consists of all parliamentary speeches in Washington D.C. (United States, 1950–2017), London (United Kingdom, 1989–2019), Vienna (Austria, 1996–2018), Amsterdam (Netherlands, 1996–2018), Wellington (New Zealand, 1989–2019), Copenhagen (Denmark, 1996–2018), Madrid (Spain, 1996–2018), Bonn (West Germany, 1950–1999), and Berlin (Germany, 1999–2019) comprising 7,425,184 speeches from 28,523 politicians. . . . We can observe the largest decrease in the language proficiency of politicians at high mean temperatures (24°C–27°C and >27°C). . . . The results highlight heat to affect all politicians without any major differences by age.” Risto Keivabu and Tobias Widmann. 2024. “The Effect of Temperature on Language Complexity: Evidence from Seven Million Parliamentary Speeches.” iScience, no. 110106, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110106

‘Tis the season for invisible forces. With Midsummer’s eve and good weather sitings of all sorts of gnomes and fairies, the unseen can be top of mind. In this issue we won’t talk about magic, but we will delve into sensory experiences that often seem unseen, starting with Sound. Sound has the potential to influence at a greater distance than any other sense (an olfactory experience needs to be nearly debilitatingly overpowering to beat out an acoustic one for its ability to influence experience far from a source)—we can often, for example, smell odours from many yards away, but hear them for miles. Whether we can see something depends on our line-of-sight and that can be blocked much more readily than a sound wave. As with other sensory experiences we can link pleasant memories and situations to particular sounds and those sounds can then put us in better moods. Neuroscience has identified patterns in how we respond to sounds, their work is particularly handy when you are soundscaping shared or public spaces. Our responses to sounds are not always entirely objective. We are less annoyed by sounds when we feel they are justified and serving some purpose, for example, and…

Sure, we can often see the source of a scent a flower, a piece of fruit, etc., but smells themselves don’t have any forms we can see with the naked eye. We are particularly likely to link memories to certain sounds, and those memories have emotional effects on us that are meaningful, too powerful to be ignored. Your associations are your associations, live with them and don’t try to smother them in some new scent trend—you won’t succeed at denying them anyway. There are complex equations that can be used to determine how much scent to add to a space, but those equations are, shall we say, “challenging” to use outside a lab anyway. In the actual real world, HVAC-related openings in rooms are in unexpected places, windows don’t fit perfectly in their frames so drafts roll through rooms, you have a stinky dog or like to eat stinky cheese—there are too many complicating factors to make using some very long equation likely to be a good use of time. So, how much scent should you add to a space? As little as possible. Scentscaping should always be subtle. To determine the right amount follow this protocol: Add some scent…

Tastes are much more physically present than sounds or smells, something does indeed rest on your tongue and produce a particular sensation, but tasting is what is known as a “chemical” sense, like smelling. Unlike either sounds or smells, tasting is a very close-up sense—you can imagine, maybe quite accurately what a chocolate cake will taste like when you see it on a distant table, although you might be able to smell it and you certainly do see it, but you don’t taste until some of it ends up in your mouth. How specifically can design influence what foods taste like? • In loud spaces, such as airplanes, the ability to taste sweet things is compromised while umami tastes are particularly powerful—which may be why your last travel snack didn’t taste the same in the air as it did on the ground when you were making it. • Foods with more angular forms seem more bitter and curvier ones sweeter. In one study, the same chocolate mix was poured into two different moulds, one with sharp 90-degree corners and one with rounded corners. The chocolate bars from the curvier moulds was pronounced sweeter by study participants and the chocolate from…

It’s wild swimming season, so lots of us are spending tons of time in water about now—but working water into our lives year-round is a very, very good idea. • Humans have a special place in their hearts for water—seeing it is something we value, a lot, think about the premium hoteliers can charge for rooms with views of water. • Seeing water through windows has a tremendously positive psychological effect on us. It reduces our stress levels, improves our wellbeing and mood. As a result, our cognitive performance, creativity, and mingling skills get a boost. When we look into an otherwise bare courtyard, if we see a burbling fountain even a few feet tall we are mentally refreshed, just as we are when we look out and see a meadow. • Indoor water features with gently moving water (think: lobby or even desktop fountains) refresh us via their appearance and their sounds, which is good for how our minds work and how pleasantly we interact with others. • Fishtanks are just as good for what goes on in our heads as the indoor water features mentioned in the last dot point—they have a meaningful payoff even if they’re not…

There’s more and more research indicating that negative ions in the air influence what happens inside our heads. Derek Brockway (2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51157ep524o) in “How Rain Can Make You Happier and Healthier,” reports, for example, that “When rain splashes on the ground, some of the molecules that make up the air pick up an electron and become negatively charged ions. When we inhale them, it is thought they can help to relieve stress and even boost our energy levels. . . . Research is taking place into the effects of negative ions, but it is thought they may boost our mood, relieve stress and give us more energy.” Also, “There is also that unmistakable smell when it rains after a long period of dry weather. The earthy scent is called petrichor, from the Greek words petra, meaning ‘stone’, and ichor, meaning ‘the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods’. Petrichor includes a chemical called geosmin, which is made by bacteria in soil. Inhaling it in the air can have a calming effect.”

Music seems to be, literally, everywhere we go, from down into the Tube to the park to Carnegie Hall. In a recent article in The New York Times (2024, “Why Do People Make Music? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/science/universal-music-evolution.html ) Carl Zimmer reports on this phenomena. Zimmer shares that “Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence. In recent years, scientists have investigated these ideas with big data.” Zimmer also reports that recently (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm9797) a “team, which comprised musicologists, psychologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists and professional musicians, recorded songs in 55 languages. . . . Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech . . . It’s possible that songs have distinct features because they have a special role in human communication separate from speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. What’s more, our brains appear to be sensitive to those features. In 2022, Dr. Patel pointed out, researchers discovered human neurons that only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.” For more information on the…

Arata and Kawakubo found that “productivity in simple tasks increased with the frequency of working from home. . . . improving the residential environment, including temperature and humidity control, is critical to enhance productivity in simple tasks. However, workers who worked from home every day had a 0.47 times lower probability of exhibiting greater creative productivity compared with those who went to the office at least once a week, suggesting a decline in creative productivity for fully remote workers. Thus, a combination of office and remote work would be expected to increase overall productivity.” Shiro Arata and Shun Kawakubo. 2023. “maximizing Worker Potential: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Workplace Environment and Personality Factors that Affect Subjective Productivity in Simple Tasks and Creative Activities.” Intelligent Buildings International, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 93-108, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508975.2023.2283218

A research team lead by Corley share that “Gardening in later life was associated with greater gain in cognitive change from age 11 to 79. . . . Higher gardening frequency was associated with better cognitive functioning at age 79. . . . Associations were independent of physical activity, SES, and health. . . . Gardening was not related to subsequent cognitive decline from age 79 to 90. . . . Higher frequency of gardening was significantly associated with greater lifetime cognitive gain from age 11 to 79 . . . higher general cognitive ability (g) level at age 79 . . . these findings suggest that engaging in gardening activities may contribute modestly to healthy cognitive functioning up to the eighth decade of life. Although physical activity was higher in gardeners, it did not explain the gardening and cognitive function relationship.” Janie Corley, Alison Pattie, Ian Deary, and Simon Cox. “Gardening and Cognitive Ageing: Longitudinal Findings from the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1921.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102361

Malaie and team link different sorts of foraging behaviour to creativity: “According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. . . . we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space (‘creativity as strategic foraging’). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity.” Soran Malaie, Michael Spivey, and Tyler Marghetis. “Divergent and Convergent Creativity are Different Kinds of Foraging.” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241245695

Amy Thomas, in “Why ‘Biophilia’ Needs to be Part of Your Next Holiday” (2024, BBC Online,https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240502-why-biophilia-needs-to-be-part-of-your-next-holiday) encourages people to improve their mental health by spending time outside—something that we talk about a lot here at The Space Doctors. Thomas shares that “Engaging with nature on vacation can not only make you feel more rested and restored, it can also enhance wellbeing when you’re back home. . . . I’ve always felt calm and at peace in nature but never stopped to consider why. The reason is what’s known as biophilia: the innate love for and connection we feel to the natural world. This desire to interact with all forms of life was popularised by the naturalist Edward O Wilson in his 1984 book Biophilia. The theory is that since we evolved as a species in nature, it’s where we feel most at home and connected. . . . Numerous studies. . . show biophilia reduces anxiety, restores mental capacity and supports emotional wellbeing, all of which can affect physical health.”

Via 5 experiments Langlois and Chandon learned that “individuals exposed to the natural environment choose healthier foods when compared to those exposed to urban environments or a control condition. Nature’s effects are observed for various foods and beverages, across samples from three countries. . . . This appears to be a robust effect; it was witnessed in food consumption decisions that took place at a snack buffet after outdoor walks and in online studies of incentive-compatible consumption intentions for entire meals following exposure to natural and urban scenes. These effects also hold across a variety of foods/beverages, contexts, and nationalities. . . . Participants in the urban condition (with views of city streets) made unhealthy choices similar to those in the control condition (with a closed curtain window), where the environment was hidden from view. . . . experiencing nature increases the importance of health in driving food choices while decreasing preferences for reduced-calorie or indulgent foods.” Maria Langlois and Pierre Chandon. 2024. “Experiencing Nature Leeds to Healthier Food Choices.” Communications Psychology, vol. 2, no. 24, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00072-x

You and colleagues report, after a virtual reality-based study, that “the addition of biophilic elements in the Metaverse could benefit [young adult] students’ health due to significantly decreased perceived stress levels and increased connections with nature. . . . Intervention 1 is Indoor Green where the classroom is decorated with green plants and natural materials. Intervention 2, named Outdoor Green incorporates outdoor natural view and daylight into indoor space through windows. In Intervention 3, Turbid Outdoor Green the outdoor natural view in Intervention 2: Outdoor Green is blocked with visual turbidity, which is intended to simulate air pollution. The biophilic elements in Indoor Green and Outdoor Green are combined in Intervention 4 –Combination. . . . In general, participants subjectively felt significantly less stress and more connection with nature in all the interventions.” Jicheng You, Xinyl Wen, Linxin Liu, Jie Yin, and John Ji. 2023. “Biophilic Classroom Environments on Stress and Cognitive Performance: A Randomised Crossover Study in Virtual Reality (VR).” PLoS ONE, vol. 18, no. 11, e0291355, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291355

Grellier and teammates report that “Physical activity (PA) reduces the risk of several non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Natural environments support recreational PA. . . . Population-representative data from the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE) survey . . . were used to estimate the weekly volume of nature-based recreational PA by adults in England in 2019. We used epidemiological dose–response data to calculate incident cases of six NCDs (ischaemic heart disease (IHD), ischaemic stroke (IS), type 2 diabetes (T2D), colon cancer (CC), breast cancer (BC) and major depressive disorder (MDD)) prevented through nature-based PA. . . . At reported volumes of nature-based PA, we estimated that 550 cases of IHD, 168 cases of IS, 1,410 cases of T2D, 41 cases of CC, 37 cases of BC and 10,552 cases of MDD were prevented, creating annual savings of £108.7million.” James Grellier, Mathew White, and 9 others. 2024. “Valuing the Health Benefits of Nature-Based Recreational Physical Activity in England.” Environment International, vol. 187, 108667, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2024.108667

Buczylowska and team share that they “examined the association between lifelong exposure to greenspace and ADHD diagnosis and potential underlying mechanisms (i.e., perceived greenspace, PA [ physical activity], neighbourhood social cohesion, and neighbourhood safety) in children aged 10–13 with and without ADHD. . . . Greenspace exposure was defined as the percentage of grass and tree cover in 500 m and 1 km buffers around lifelong residential addresses, respectively. Parents reported information about the availability of domestic garden and data on potential mediators was collected with questionnaires. . . . tree cover was positively related to PA, and PA was subsequently negatively related to ADHD diagnosis. Tree cover and garden were both associated with higher levels of perceived greenspace, which in turn related to stronger perceptions of neighbourhood social cohesion.” Dorota Buczylowska, Nitika Singh, and 11 others. 2024. “Lifelong Greenspace Exposure and ADHD in Polish Children: Role of Physical Activity and Perceived Neighbourhood Characteristics.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 96, 102313, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102313

Yavuz and colleagues link playing video games and successfully navigating from one place and another. They “investigated the effect of video game experience and reliance on GPS on navigation ability using the mobile app Sea Hero Quest, which has been shown to predict real-world wayfinding performance. . . . [statistical analyses] found no significant association between reliance on GPS and wayfinding performance. There was a significant association between weekly hours of video gaming and wayfinding performance. . . . there was a significant association between hours of video game use and navigation performance, such that more hours of video gaming was associated with better navigation performance. . . . video game genre had no significant association with wayfinding ability.” Emre Yavuz, Chuanxiuyue He, Christoffer Gahnstrom, Sarah Goodroe, Antoine Coutrot, Michael Hornberger, Mary Hegarty, and Hugo Spiers. 2024. “Video Gaming, But Not Reliance on GPS, Is Associated with Spatial Navigation Performance.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 96, 102296, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102296

Ong, Cintron, and Fuligni link pleasant time spent in nature to lower inflammation levels: “Leveraging survey and biomarker data from 1,244 adults (mean age = 54.50 years, range = 34–84 years) from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS II) study, we examined associations between nature engagement, operationalized as the frequency of pleasant nature encounters, and systemic inflammation. Concentrations of interleukin-6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), and fibrinogen were measured from fasting blood samples. Analyses adjusted for sociodemographic, health behavior, and psychological well-being covariates. . . . More frequent positive nature contact was independently associated with lower circulating levels of inflammation. . . . More frequent positive contact with nature was related to lower systemic inflammation, even after adjusting for a wide range of health and demographic covariates.” Anthony Ong, Dakota Cintron, and Gabriel Fuligni. 2024. “Engagement with Nature and Proinflammatory Biology.” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, vol. 119, pp. 51-55, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2024.03.043

Pang’s work confirms how complex our relationship is with our world. As Pang reports “We experience only our brain’s internal representation of the outside world, which is limiting in two main ways. First, we pick up just a very small range of things. For example, we can see only a very small band of electromagnetic radiation . . . . Second, we have discovered the brain filters, corrects, and interprets the overwhelming amount of sensory data we encounter, which is essential if we are to make any sense of the world around us and to act within a complex environment. Our experiences, then, are different from what is actually out there in the world. This does not mean an objective reality doesn’t exist, or that what we experience is any less ‘real.’ But it does mean that they are different.” Damien Pang. 2024. “Why Pink Doesn’t Exist.” Psychology Today, vol. 57 no. 2, pp. 35, 45.

Here at The Space Doctors we generally keep what we talk about in the here and now, but we do acknowledge the importance of all of our spiritual lives and how much practices like meditation can add to our lives (or could add to our lives if we could only find the time to leave the rat race for a few minutes and work them into our lives regularly. Not to get too woo-woo with you but, design can help us connect with whatever forces in the universe we choose to value. What follows assume that you connect/meditate/etc. in a quiet peaceful sort of way, if not, alter the content that follows accordingly. For example, if your devotionals are high-energy, basically reverse what follows—i.e., don’t favour the unsaturated light colours mentioned, but go with saturated darker ones on walls and other surfaces. Visiting religious spaces is generally mentally refreshing. These spaces are distinct from the hustle-bustle worlds where we spend so much of our time, where so many of our life concerns are so firmly based. That psychological distance makes mental revitalization much more powerful. Successful spaces for most spiritual practices and meditation are both very relaxing and biophilic. That…

We all need to sleep the amount that’s best for us and when we don’t spend as much time in Dreamland as our body requires all of our mental processes are compromised—we aren’t very good at cognitively processing whatever comes our way, we’re grumpy and difficult to get along with, etc. Design can make it more likely that you sleep well. How? • Neuroscience research has established all sorts of ways that design can encourage us to relax, as discussed in detail in this article. For instance, seeing unsaturated, lighter colours can help us decompress, just as natural materials do, warmer and dimmer lighting from tabletop or floor-standing fixtures, just for starters. Circadian lighting, discussed in this article, can acclimate your body systems to sleeping at a reasonable time for the longitude and latitude of your home. Science has shown that even that lavender stuffed pillow that your Aunt Millie sent for your last birthday can help you calm, de-stress, and sleep. • If you can swing it, snag a bedroom on the second floor or higher. Our primordial selves relish the opportunity to sleep higher off the ground, in the branches of a protecting tree. • If the shape…

Any human older than a toddler needs to be able to have privacy when they choose—privacy is not an option for our mental wellbeing. When we have privacy, we have control over who can see and hear us and who we can see and hear. Groups, at work, partners-in-life, etc., also need to have privacy when they wish, as they choose. Privacy is different from being distraction free—simply being distraction free means that your thoughts are not interrupted at any particular moment, but since you are not in control that interruption could come at any time. We need privacy because when we want and have it we can, with abandon, make sense of recent events in our life and once we’ve sorted out our lives return to the world refreshed and ready to give it another go. When we don’t have privacy when we need it, our mental processes don’t run at their best, like a record player that starts to “skip” (if you don’t remember record players Google them and you’ll understand). A place can be private at a particular time of day (e.g., no one lingers in the dining room after dinner except Mom who spends her time…

The airports on our planet need environmental psychology. A lot. They’re packed with people who are stressed, for any number of reasons—some are concerned about making connections, for example, and others are nervous about flying, even if their flights are on schedule. Environmental design can make the lives of people in airports less stressful, and even more pleasant. Environmental psychology research makes it clear, for example, that: • Feeling that we have a reasonable amount of control over our environment is necessary for our psychological wellbeing, and it’s particularly important as at-airport waits continue. A reasonable level of control means that we can do things such as select from a variety of seats in assorted configurations, decide what sort of over-priced airport snacks we prefer, and choose where to recharge our stash of electronic devices, for example. Too many choices can be overpowering, so it’s best if those planning airports pare options down to the ones people are most likely to need/use—fifteen seating configurations are too many, six probably meet most travellers’ needs. • A range of space-use options also makes it more likely that people from different national cultures and with varying personalities feel comfortable in a space. For…

Many airports across the United States are adding soothing refuges, applying some of the principles of neuroscience-informed biophilic design that we discuss in The Space Doctors’ articles. Christine Chung (2024, “Now Arriving at an Airport Lounge Near You: Peleton Bikes, Nap Pods and Caviar Service,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/travel/credit-card-airport-lounges.html) shares that “A handful of new lounges opened by credit card issuers, including Capital One and American Express, have recently landed in airports across the United States, promising posh spots of refuge for select travelers awaiting their flights. At La Guardia Airport, caviar service will be available for pre-order. At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, travelers can get complimentary massages, and at Denver International Airport, there are nap pods. In addition to amenities, the new lounges provide an ambience reminiscent of a luxury hotel lobby, both in interior design and scale, and fit several hundred people at a time.”

Using data collected from over 4 US states, Towe-Goodman and many colleagues link between living near green spaces (for instance, forests, parks, residential yards) and mental health. They report that “greater residential green space exposure [from birth and within an area up to ¾ of a mile from home] was associated with fewer internalizing symptoms [for example, anxiety and depression] in early childhood but not in middle childhood. . . . Green space exposure was measured using a biannual (ie, summer and winter) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, a satellite image–based indicator of vegetation density assigned to monthly residential history from birth to outcome assessment. . . . Outcomes were assessed at mean . . . ages of 4.2 . . . years in . . . children aged 2 to 5 years and 7.8 . . . years in . . . children aged 6 to 11 years. . . . the association of green space with fewer internalizing symptoms was observed only in early childhood, suggesting a sensitive period for nature exposure.” Nissa Towe-Goodman, Kristen McArthur, Michael Willoughby, and 25 others. 2024. “Green Space and Internalizing or Externalizing Symptoms Among Children.” Jama Network Open, vol. 7, no. 4, e2455742,…

In terms of speed of response to what we see, some of us have a clear advantage—which may explain why you’ve never excelled at sports. Haarlem and teammates determined that “some people have an innate advantage in certain settings where response time is crucial, such as in ball sports, or in competitive gaming. . . . individuals differ widely in the rate at which they perceive visual signals. Some people perceive a rapidly changing visual cue at frequencies that others cannot, which means some access more visual information per timeframe than others. The rate with which we perceive the world is known as our ‘temporal resolution’, and in many ways it is similar to the refresh rate of a computer monitor” (study published in PLoS One). “I Spy With My Speedy Eye – Scientists Discover Speed of Visual Perception Ranges Widely in Humans.” 2024. Press release, Trinity College Dublin, https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/top-stories/featured/i-spy-with-my-speedy-eye–scientists-discover-speed-of-visual-perception-ranges-widely-in-humans-/

Yi and colleagues found “that consumers under disease threat are less willing to buy products presented in a dense display. This is because disease threat activates a high-density avoidance mindset, which is carried over to the way in which products are placed. Moreover, this effect is mitigated [reduced] when diseases are noninfectious or when disinfectant products are displayed. A set of four studies, which adopt lab and field settings, using different manipulations and measures, provide convergent evidence for these effects. . . . Study 4 provides real world evidence through a field experiment.” Yanxi Yi, Wangshuai Wang, Sahar Karimi, Sotaro Katsumata, and Lu Meng. “Keeping Distance! How Infectious Disease Threat Lowers Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Densely Displayed Products.” Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21996

Rucker and associates “conducted an experimental study with a German company whose employees usually work in an activity-based workspace consisting of open, closed and informal spaces that can be used by employees depending on the task at hand. Employees self-assessed their creative performance for different creative tasks (individual vs. team) and in different work environments (office vs. home office). Our findings reveal that for individual creative tasks (e.g. creating a presentation), employees are more creative when working from home (vs. in the office) because they experience higher levels of perceived psychological freedom. . . . By contrast, for team creative tasks (e.g. developing ideas for a new product), employees reported being more creative when working in the office (vs. from home) due to higher levels of perceived psychological safety.” Marc Rucker, Oscar Pakos, Sophia Windschiegl, and Kai-Ingo Voigt. “Working in the Office or Working from Home: Where are Employees Most Creative?” Creativity and Innovation Management, in press, https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12601

Relocating, changing where you live can be a jarring experience. There are all sorts of practical things that you need to figure out when you move – like the fastest route to the market for when you need to zip out for that one ingredient you forgot – but moving can be a psychological shock for more than practical reasons. Handling your move like a neuroscience pro means less stress for you and starting to enjoy spending time in your new home sooner. Choosing a New Place Selecting a place to live can be a challenge. It’s relatively easy to think about your basic practical requirements for a place to live. How many bedrooms do you need for your kids? Does your dog need a yard to cavort in or is he a fine-being-on-a-leash sort of canine? Do you do mammoth holiday bakes and actually need counter space in your kitchen to gift-give as you wish? Your psychological requirements are more difficult to pin down. Personality has a big effect on where you should decide to live. Forgot what your personality profile is? Your housemates’ personalities? There’s a useful quiz here: https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/ten-item-personality-measure-tipi/ There is some evidence that people who are…

When you are getting ready to move, what should you pack first, unpack first, not pack at all? When you are getting ready to move the thought of getting everything you own into boxes and from your previous home to your new one can seem daunting. Who would think that the things we’ve decided we need to run our lives could be so cumbersome. The things that you should pack first are those that are most precious to you, that way you can ensure that they are packed carefully and are more likely to get to your new home unscathed. What is precious? Things that are precious are those that you think say the most about you as a person—so the exact list will depend on how you see yourself. If you see yourself as a sports person, pack your trophies and medals carefully and early. Proud of your role as guardian of your family’s heritage? Get that silver into a box early. The stuff that’s packed the very lastest of last should be the things that make you feel good in the moment. These might be the perfume that lifts your spirits, or the omelette pan that always seems…

Even if you move into a brand-new home, one that has never been lived in by anyone else, you’ll need to make some changes before your new house becomes your new home. The first place to assess and potentially change is the area where you will sleep. If you are not going to be able to relax enough to drift off to sleep, your new house will quickly become your new hell. If you are pondering what colours, patterns, etc., are relaxing use the search bar at the top of this page. The same goes for experiences that will help you perform best mentally (we’ll get to home offices in the next paragraph), etc. – the index is your friend. Next in priority is your home office/work area, if you have or need one. If your office doesn’t work for you, you may find that your income falls short of your house payments. Socializing with others is key to our happiness as humans, as a species we live to mingle (even the most introverted of us need time with others when we choose). So after you get your home workspace together, spend time making your house a space where you…

If your new home has a garden, you may be wondering what you should plant. The Space Doctors talked about designing gardens where you can relax and have great times in this article. and also search “garden” in our search box, or create your own journal here using the search term “garden”. Your garden can have a meaningful effect on your life in your home via the smell of the plants that you grow – which may influence what you decide to plant. Rigorous scientific research has shown that that these plants can influence your mental state in meaningful ways: • Florals – reduce anxiety (to a very great extent, after smelling hyacinths and jasmine, for instance) • Orange – lowers anxiety levels • Lavender – relaxes and encourages better sleep while enhancing trust in other people and reducing cravings for cigarettes • Lemon – another relaxer which also improves mood and cognitive performance (and has also been tied to feeling lighter and thinner) • Grapefruit and also tangerine – energize • Mango – helps people feel more relaxed • Rosemary and sage – both improve memory function and rosemary elevates alertness • Peppermint – boosts memory performance and alertness…

If you were at all happy in your old home you had privacy when you wanted it. To be happy in your new home your need to make sure that you do. Privacy is having control over what you see and hear and who can see and hear you. It’s entirely different from being distraction free as being distraction free simply means that at any particular moment nothing is preventing you from effectively processing information flowing into your head and bubbling around inside it—in situations without privacy that can change at any time. You don’t need walls and a door for privacy, but it certainly makes things easier. Some people find their only privacy in bathrooms, which have both, but if your only private times are in bathrooms life can seem dismal. For privacy you may need to travel to the furthest end of your garden or to sit in one particular chair in your living room at a particular time of day when your kids are at school. Maybe for privacy you need to go to the roof or the basement or you are lucky enough to have a Wendy house that you still fit into (or maybe its…

Have you ever had the experience that you just seem to be unable to communicate with someone about design (or some other topic for that matter)? Your inability to communicate may be because they are an idiot (ignoring the most obvious explanation for any situation is not a good idea). Odds are that they, however, do have at least normal intelligence which makes proving the “idiot” hypothesis something of a challenge. It could be that you are having issues explaining something to each other because you grew up speaking different languages. Some languages, such as French, German, and Italian, assign gender to nouns—but not all languages classify the same nouns as masculine and feminine. In some languages “chair” is masculine and in some it is feminine, for instance. If in the first language you spoke a particular noun, say bridge, was feminine, you’ll favour versions of that noun that share attributes of a stereotypical woman, even if you’re later speaking and even thinking in a different language. The reverse is true for nouns that in your first language were masculine, they ideally share masculine attributes. An example: if you grew up speaking a language where bridges are feminine, you’ll have…

It seems a lot of us are having trouble sleeping in our homes (see this article for neuroscience research-based insights on creating a place where people sleep well).  So many of us are sleep challenged that multiple hotel chains are developing spaces where we can sleep like a baby, actually probably better than a baby. Sosenko shares that “A.I.-assisted beds, on-call hypnotherapists and sequestered guest rooms, including one inside a stainless steel sculpture, are taking sleep tourism to the next level. . . . Relaxing the mind is a common theme in sleep tourism, but how each property tries to accomplish that varies. . . . At the Beaumont in London, travelers can stay in perhaps the cocooniest room of them all, called, simply, ROOM (£1,402 per night, or about $1,780), a 745-square-foot suite inside a three-story stainless steel sculpture of a crouching man at the hotel entrance. It lacks a TV, a phone, even wall art. The goal of the British sculptor Antony Gormley, who designed ROOM, is for guests “to achieve a meditative stillness, to lose a sense of one’s body in the darkness and to allow the mind to expand.” Carla Sosenko, in “$1,780 to Spend the…

As Jordan Valinsky and Eva Rothenberg report in “Here’s What the Starbucks of the Future Looks Like” (2024, CNN,https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/17/food/starbucks-accessible-store-design/index.html ) Starbucks is making big changes, ones that should make their sites more pleasantly accessible by all. Valinsky and Rothenberg share that accessibility-augmenting design elements to be used include “softer indoor lighting that ‘minimizes glare, shadow patterns and backlighting.’ . . . The store design will also take acoustics into account by using materials that minimize background noise or echoes, which could disrupt people who use hearing aids. . . . recently, some businesses have instated protocols and features that help reduce overstimulation and sensory overload. . . . new stores will cut back on the front-of-house clutter with a new ‘continuous, unobstructed pedestrian path’ that makes it easier for customers in wheelchairs or motorized scooters to get around the stores. Counters where coffee and food is placed for pick-up will also be lowered to ‘accommodate wheelchair access and support better communication’ between workers and customers, the company said. Other changes include a new register that has a portable, adjustable stand, pictures of food and drink items, as well as voice assistance and screen magnification features.”

Nagayama found that having multiple worksites can boost our creativity.  Via a survey they probed  “the relationship between MLW [multiple-locational work] . . . and worker outcomes, such as engagement, creativity, and well-being. . . . The results showed a positive association between MLW and all three outcomes, with the strongest relationship being observed for creativity. Additionally, locational feature diversity . . . .  amplified the positive association between MLW and creativity. . . . MLW can enhance creativity through the exposure to diverse stimuli gained from utilizing distinctive locational features.” Multiple work locations studied included both options within a workplace and options outside it, such as cafés and coworking sites. Also, “Studies have shown that collective creativity is significantly lower online than in person because workers tend to focus more on their computer screens than thinking of ideas, or because team synchronicity is undermined.” Susumu Nagayama. 2023. “Does Working at Third Places Work?  Multi-Locational Work for Engagement, Creativity, and Well-Being.”  Journal of Creativity, vol. 33, no. 3, 100070.

Van der Wouden and Youn (as reported by Ayshford) studied “17 million scientific publications over the past 45 years find[ing] that researchers who collaborated locally were much more likely to gain new knowledge from their teammates than those who collaborated at a distance. The trend was especially pronounced for researchers in science and engineering, as well as early-career scholars. . . . being together physically—reading body language, mulling a problem at a whiteboard, and teaming up to use specialized laboratory equipment—is especially valuable when knowledge isn’t yet codified. . . . ‘If you want to be innovative, if you want to collaborate and learn from each other at the cutting edge,’ Youn says, ‘you need to be in person’.” Collaborations were  categorized as “local” when people worked about a 10-minute (or less) walk from each other. Emily Ayshford. 2024. “Could Remote Work Hurt On-the-Job Learning?” KelloggInsight, https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/could-remote-work-hurt-on-the-job-learning

Nguyen and colleagues report that their “research evaluated the cost-effectiveness of three hypothetical SB interventions: behavioural (BI), environmental (EI) and multi-component intervention (MI). . . . The effectiveness of the modelled interventions in reducing daily sitting time (informed by published meta-analyses) was modelled for the Australian working population aged 20-65 years. . . .  SB [sedentary behaviour] interventions are not cost-effective when a reduction in sitting time is the outcome measure of interest. The cost-effectiveness results are heavily driven by the cost of the sit-stand desks and the small HALYs [health-adjusted life years] gained from reducing sitting time.” Nguyen, J. Ananthapavan, L. Gao, D. Dustan, and M. Moodie.  2023. “Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Sedentary Behaviour Interventions in Offices to Reduce Sitting Time in Australian Desk-Based Workers: A Modelling Study.” PLoS ONE, vol. 18, no 6, e0287710, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287710

The façade of your home is the face that it presents to the world. Just like our own faces have a big effect on the instantaneous opinions formed of us as people, the front of our house significantly influences the impression that others form of our home, and us.  It’s not just the fronts of our homes that send out messages to the world, so do storefronts and the entrances to offices and healthcare facilities and schools. The messages sent and received also guide people to act in particular ways when they approach a structure, pass through its doors, and travel about inside, working, socializing, etc. What can neuroscience tell us about how we should “present” our homes to the world?  Scientists have found that: We find familiar façade forms comforting.A key word in the last sentence is “familiar.” That does not mean exactly the same as every other, it does mean “understandable.” Too much the same doesn’t allow much unspoken communication of who residents are, which adds to resident and viewer stress.  A façade that is totally different from any façade that’s ever been built is great for catapulting us into mental efforts to understand how to use it—questions…

Spring can often seem to be the season for burnout, the winter has been long, and just before the plants really spring back to life, our existences can seem bleak—and we all work too hard. Neuroscience research indicates some ways we can realistically use design to make ourselves feel slightly less burned out: Create spaces where you can actually get done what you need to get done—no lying to yourself about this or imagining a rosier situation than actually exists.If you need to focus to get your work done, make sure you can work in a place that won’t distract you or divert you from your goal of getting things done.   Biophilic design can help you accomplish your goals, as described here.  (and search Biophilic Design here). Even if you enjoy the freedom to work from home, to wear whatever you feel like as you work, etc., you may actually have to leave your house from time-to-time to do your job well. Designing a place where you will do knowledge work well, for example, is discussed in this article. Give yourself plenty of opportunities to mentally refresh if you’re doing work that requires concentration. For example: Look at nature prints…

Dominic Lutyens in an article for bbc.com (“Inside the Homes That ‘Whisper Rather Than Scream Luxury,’” 2024, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240208-inside-the-homes-that-whisper-rather-than-scream-luxury ) writes about the rise of quietly luxurious spaces. As he reports, “In his foreword to the book [Quiet Luxury], Wim Pauwels writes: “‘Quiet Luxury refers to understated architecture and interiors made with very high-quality materials. All interiors are a non-ostentatious take on luxury, with a focus on exquisite materials and fabrics, muted colours, timeless designs, pared-back chic. It is all about developing a personal style that the architects, interior designers and homeowners believe in, far away from volatile trends.’” Go to the web address noted in the first paragraph and take a look at the interiors shown.  They seem a lot like biophilically designed spaces (talked about in detail here) – they feature natural materials and abundant natural light, for example. Some do seem stark and like they could use some unsaturated light colors on surfaces, among other neuroscience-based fixes, however. Quietly luxurious design may lead to more direct discussion of biophilic design.  Hurray!

Harris and Whiting found that “Participants in online classrooms struggle to make sense of emotional interactions. This is due to the separation of physical place between persons and the inability to see the reaction of bodies in online classrooms. . . . This study uses a micro ethnographic approach to observe two online multicultural education courses over a 7-week term to explore the normative and socially organized practices of affect and emotion. . . . Findings suggest the emotional geography of online, synchronous classrooms are characterized by the duality of space and place. This includes tensions around visualizing affect and understanding emotion without shared references and physical places.” Elizabeth Harris and Erin Whiting. 2024. “Embodied Place in Disembodied Space: The Emotional Geography of Online Classrooms.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 50, 100988, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100988

Lou, Wang, Yuan, and Lu used data from Hong Kong to measure assessed WTP (willingness to pay) for various design features in homes: “We first simulate the metrics of five housing attributes under different layouts, i.e., spatial daylight autonomy (sDA), spatial glare autonomy (sGA), natural ventilation effectiveness (NVE), predicted mean vote (PMV) [temperature], and energy use intensity (EUI). Then, WTP for these attributes is disentangled from housing prices. . . . findings demonstrate that a 1 % increase in sDA, sGA, and NVE corresponds to respective increases of 1.342 %, 0.694 %, and 2.842 % in housing prices, showing that residents value greatly the presence of natural ventilation and well-lit spaces with appropriate daylight. However, no significant correlations are found for PMV and EUI, suggesting a lack of a general preference towards thermal comfort or energy consumption in the Hong Kong context. This study contributes to a deeper knowledge of key well-being attributes in housing design as well as practical insights to create housing environments that prioritise occupant well-being and enhance market value.” Jinfeng Lou, Bolun Wang, Ziqing Yuan, and Weisheng Lu.  2024. “Willingness to Pay for Well-Being Housing Attributes Driven by Design Layout: Evidence from Hong Kong.”  Building and Environment, vol. 251, 111227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.11127

Neighbourhood design and some parenting practices seem to be related. Mygind and colleagues state that “There were no observable associations between residential greenness [i.e., Normalized Difference in Vegetation Index] within a 1,600 m network radius and parenting practices, mother-infant bonding, or infant socioemotional function. The findings were largely corroborated by sensitivity analyses (i.e., NDVI within 100, 250, 500, and 1,000 m and distance to park). Shorter distances to a park were associated with less hostile parenting. More residential greenness (1,000 and 1,600 m) was associated with stronger father-infant bonding and more hostile parenting amongst the most stressed parents in exploratory analyses. Residential greenness might be a socioecological precursor for father-infant bonding.” Laerke Mygind, Christopher Greenwood, Primrose Letcher, Suzanne Mavoa, Kate Lycett, and Peter Enticott. 2023. “Is Neighborhood Nature and Ecological Precursor of Parenting Practices, Infant-Parent Bonding, and Infant Socioemotional Function? Environment and Behavior, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 278-306, https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231182686

Forrester and colleagues report that “This study aims to empirically test whether identifying as a supporter of either New South Wales (NSW) or Queensland (QLD) rugby league teams influences the extent that their respective team colours blue and maroon are associated with positively and negatively valenced words. . . . NSW supporters were faster and more accurate when categorizing positive words presented in blue than maroon font and negative words in maroon than blue font. While QLD supporters did not significantly differ when categorizing words in either blue or maroon, they rated blue and maroon equally positively in contrast to the NSW supporters.” These findings indicate positive links to team colours for fans of those teams. Declan Forrester, Heather Winskel, and Mitchell Longstaff.  “Effects of Team Affiliation on Colour-Valence Associations.”  Colour Research and Application, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/col.22915

Horton, Adam, and Galinsky share that “Enclothed cognition refers to the systematic influence that clothes can have on the wearer’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors through their symbolic meaning. It has attracted considerable academic and nonacademic interest. . .  To determine whether the larger body of research on enclothed cognition possesses evidential value and replicable effects, we performed z-curve and meta-analyses using 105 effects from 40 studies across 24 articles. . . . our results . . . affirm the evidential value for effects published after 2015. These later studies support the core principle of enclothed cognition—what we wear influences how we think, feel, and act.” It seems likely that these findings can be extended to other contexts. C. Horton, Hajo Adam, and Adam Galinsky.  “Evaluating Evidence for Enclothed Cognition: Z-Curve and Meta-Analyses.”  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231182478

After our houses and our cars, our furniture may be our biggest investment.  Sofas, chairs, tables . . . none of them come cheap and modern life seems to require multiple pieces for each room in our home—all of which can make setting foot in a furniture store (whether for new or used pieces) a petrifying experience (if you actually were petrified, you might easily become someone else’s furniture). In this issue we’re going to focus on furniture—what yours should be like, where you should put it, and beyond furniture, what furnishings you should invest in—based on neuroscience research. What should your furniture be made of? Reports on our earliest days, say episodes of The Flintstones, indicates that our first furniture was made of stone, and well it might have been—but only the most occasional of stone furniture is popular—or even acceptable—today. The very best furniture for us is furniture that is made of materials that will hold up in the conditions where we’ll put it to work—it’s awful for our self-esteem to need to use broken things and those in poor condition (antiques and things we inherit from loved ones fit into a special category of our stuff and…

Once you decide what materials your furniture should be made of, other questions come to the fore:  What should that furniture look like at a very, very basic level? Regardless of our personality, culture, and other similar factors, humans will respond in predictable ways to lines that they see, in 2-dimensions in upholstery and 3-D in the shapes of the furniture itself (for example, a line drawn along the top of a sofa or the legs of a table). We associate curving lines (again in 2-D and also in 3-D) with comfort and find it comfortable in spaces that feature them, we also feel calmer when they predominate.  Upholstery patterns with lots of smoothly rounded organic shapes, for instance, are a great choice in that den where you want to decompress or your bedroom.  The same goes for furniture with curvier backs or arms or legs or tabletop shapes, for instance.  Have a laundry room or an exercise space?  Those are areas where efficiency and action are a real plus, so all of the more angular furniture that you moved out of that den or bedroom can “live” there. No space ever features entirely curvilinear lines or entirely rectilinear/angular ones. …

We tend not to think too much about what a design option feels like when we’re pondering choices available to us—but what we feel with our skin has a powerful effect on how we think and behave—and not just if what we’re feeling is itchy, icky, or sticky. Humans find soft textures, like flannels soothing to touch and the more textures that get added to a space the higher our energy levels go, more textures means more information that we need to process. Rougher textures, ones that offer even the slightest resistance to our fingertips are unpleasant to touch with our hands and can lead us to feel stressed.  When we can feel a rough texture underfoot we go on alert, looking for danger ahead or around. Both men and women have the same number of nerve endings at the ends of their fingers and since women’s fingers are generally smaller than men’s they have a more acute sense of touch.  That means that a husband may sit in a chair and believe it to be tremendously comfy but when a wife decides to give the same chair a try, she may find the armrests on the same chair unpleasantly…

As with so many things, it all depends.  How you arrange your furniture should depend on how you intend to use the space it’s in.  Logic prevails.  And try to invest in the bare minimum (you have other things to do with your money, but you can’t just give away Aunt Esther’s sofa if you inherit it either).  More furniture in a space will make it seem smaller, more crowded. Your kindergarten teacher was right, we do interact more freely with people whose eyes we can see, hence the prevalence of seats arranged in circles whenever a conversation might be in the offing.  Everyone needs an eye contact break every so often, however, so it’s wonderful if there’s something vaguely within that ring to which people can gracefully divert their eyes when they need an eye contact break.  It can seem rude to actually look away from whomever your talking to but if your eyes travel a few feet in one direction or another while you look at a plant or a fish tank or something similar, no offense will be taken. Although circular arrangements of chairs can have a lot going for them, sometimes rows are really the way…

Read this article on personality and design to learn more. Also, remember that furniture style sends all sorts of messages nonverbally.  Select accordingly.  Are you and your family modern farmers (even though you live in Manhattan)?  Are you so tuned in to what’s au courant that comfort doesn’t matter at all?  Are you into your ethnic heritage?  Want to say something else to yourself and others about what’s important to you?

Holly Williams, in a recent post on the BBC (2024, “The Joy of ‘Cosycore’ and Hunkering Down,” https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240105-the-joy-of-cosycore-and-hunkering-down) reiterates just how wonderful a cozy, hygge inspired space can be at this time of year.  We discussed hygge in detail in this article.  In a place-based-comfort section of her article Williams shares that “The Danish concept [hygge], for ‘a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being’ (as, once-more, defined by the OED), exploded in popularity around the world in 2016. The Scottish version of hygge, “coorie”, or còsagach in Gaelic, was soon being explored by Gabriella Bennett. . . . In an era of great political turmoil, it seems we were ready to embrace the idea that happiness could be found in small pleasures like thick socks, hot chocolate and cinnamon buns. . . .  many other northern nations have been plundered for their marketable “secrets” to a happier life. Yet it is striking how many of these seem to go back to similar principles: stop fighting the seasons or trying to be productive, and embrace the pleasures of being relaxed, warm and cosy. Several of these also have a social aspect to them.” Norway’s…

Think that nonverbal signaling via design is silly?  Read Tim Dowling’s 2024 article in The Guardian, “Shelf-Absorbed: Eight Ways to Arrange Your Bookshelves – And What They Say About You” (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/shelf-absorbed-nine-ways-to-arrange-your-bookshelves-and-what-they-say-about-you). Dowling’s work does not seem science-based, but it does shed light on something all of us are doing all the time, trying to figure out who other people really are, in part based on what spaces they have some control over look, etc., like. We do this at home, at work, and anywhere else we find ourselves, and the impressions we form are important, powerful, and sustained, as we discussed in this article. Read Dowling’s fun article to learn if the way your books are arranged/placed says “casual intellectual abundance: my books, they just get everywhere!” or “It just looks as if you’ve tried to purchase cultural credibility by the metre” or “implies that you have a pretty full dance card when it comes to reading. Add in the occasional uncorrected proof to suggest you get sent a lot of books for free because your opinion has currency” or something else entirely. 

Many of us are not in the best of all moods as we slog our way through the beginning of any year – whether we live in the Northern Hemisphere and it’s just too cold, or the Southern one and it’s too hot (we will not mention the lucky few who live near the equator where the weather is often idyllic all year round). When the cold and the hot keep us indoors thoughts naturally turn to changing things up during our weather-induced confinements.  As we ponder our predicaments thoughts turn to changing some colours—on walls, upholstery, rugs, and elsewhere. Then the stress starts to build. We go to our local paint store and come face-to-face with a sea of thousands of paint chips, all calling our name asking us to choose them. The same goes for trying to select new rugs, curtains, etc. If we can’t narrow down the selection using any sort of rigorously derived (i.e., science-based) criteria, we feel overwhelmed and go home without, for instance, any paint at all or with the first paint colour our hand comes to rest on be it a lovely smokey violet or a mood bruising mud brown. It doesn’t have…

When we’re spending more time inside our home can start to smell stuffy, particularly if we can’t open the windows because it seems hot or cold outside—and stuffiness is bad for our wellbeing, mood, and cognitive performance. So, adding very faint, light amounts of air scents can seem like a good idea. But which ones are best? Science has clearly established the effects different scents can have on what goes on in our head: Smelling pleasant scents boosts our mood, which is also great for how we get along with others and how effectively our minds work, for example—if you’ll have lots of guests, it’s handy to know that around the world floral scents are consistently positively rated. The scents of oranges, jasmine, hyacinth, or vanilla can help us feel less anxious. Getting a whiff of lemon, mango, or lavender is relaxing. Our memories work better when we can smell rosemary, sage, or peppermint. Lavender can help alleviate sleep issues.When we smell it we also are more trusting, which can be good or bad. We feel more alert when smelling rosemary or peppermint. We’re likely to feel more energized when smelling grapefruit, tangerine, peppermint, or eucalyptus. The smell of peppermint…

As the new year dawns, many of us decide to spend time at creative endeavours, and design can help with that! 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 lot of creative work, even tasks that have officially been delegated to a group, is actually done alone—the material in the next few paragraphs is relevant to both solo and group work areas.  And spaces that support creativity are great areas for innovation, as well. Research conducted to the highest standards by neuro-, cognitive, and social scientists, worldwide, makes it clear that people are most apt to think creatively in spaces that: Feature the colour green. Looking at the colour green has been tied to enhanced creative performance.  Among all the greens available, those that are not very saturated and relatively light are the best options.  These sorts of greens, an example of which is a sage green with lots of white mixed into it, create the optimum atmosphere for knowledge work generally—one where people are calm and collected enough to focus on whatever they’re…

This a time of year when many of us are travelling, but spending time in planes, trains, and automobiles can be quite a challenge psychologically—and of these modes of transport, being airborne can be the most taxing. Why? The pandemic has sensitized all of us to coughs and sneezes—so hearing them not makes us tense—even when they’re allergic reactions to the cat traveling in the next seat. When we’re stressed, wherever we are, our mood and our ability to process the information we’re gathering from the world around us and to get along with other people falls lower and lower. When we’re traveling on an airplane we’re also significantly stressed by the fact that we don’t have much control of the world around us once we step onto the plane. We can’t leave, or stand and move around when we want to, we can’t do much about the awful smell of the lunch our row-mate brought onto the plane, etc. We can turn on an off our light and fiddle with the fan overhead.     All this tension makes us less comfortable physically and also even more cognitively impaired. All sorts of things happen on planes that can add stress…

We tend to focus on what a space we’re developing looks like and that can be a big mistake. For most of us, happily we have multiple sensory systems operating simultaneously and we’re pulling in information on multiple channels, which all gets integrated in our heads as discussed in this article.  Something that is often not acknowledged as we’re designing is that different people have different dominant senses.  The information that you receive through your dominant sense has the most significant effect on how you think and behave, your emotional experience. Lots of people are visually dominant.  That means that what they see has the most profound reactions on them.  Design is often discussed in ways that reinforces attention to visual details in a space—think about the websites where you travel to see design options—they are, at least now, entirely visual, maybe a soundtrack of some sort (if your speakers are turned on, etc.), but certainly lacking a scent and touch component. And some people are hearing, smell, or touch dominant. Spaces that are designed only for what they look like miss an opportunity to help people who are not visually dominant live their best lives.  For example, flooring shouldn’t…

Latini and associates report that “a new design approach for preliminary assessment of BD [biophilic design] intervention in VR is presented [in their paper]. . . . . [it compares] three office layouts (Indoor Green, Outdoor Green and Non-Biophilic) and three acoustic scenarios (Office, Office + Traffic and Office + Nature). . . . participants . . . . [completed] three cognitive tasks for each acoustic condition. . . .  The findings of the cognitive tests revealed that audio-visual connection with nature can positively influence working memory, inhibition and task-switching performance. The acoustic factor exhibited a higher improvement effect compared to the visual factor, between 23 % and 71 % against 12 %–39 %. Moreover, the Natural sound in the Indoor Green condition was the most supportive visual-acoustic condition while Traffic in the Non-Biophilic environment was the most disruptive one.” Arianna Latini, Simone Torresin, Tin Oberman, Elisa Giuseppe, Francesco Aletta, Jian Kang, and Marco D’Orazio.  “Effects of Biophilic Design Interventions on University Students’ Cognitive Performance: An Audio-Visual Experimental Study in an Immersive Virtual Office Environment.”  Building and Environment, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.111196

We may need to reevaluate how we manage light at night in our homes.  Blume and teammates found that “Ambient light however does not only allow us to see, it also influences our sleep-wake rhythm. . . . .  If light consists solely of short wavelengths of 440 to 490 nanometres, we perceive it as blue. If short-wavelength light activates the ganglion cells, they signal to the internal clock that it is daytime. The decisive factor here is how intense the light is per wavelength; the perceived colour is not relevant.” “Light Colour is Less Important for the Internal Clock Than Originally Thought.”  2023.  Press release, University of Basel, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1029731

Guo, Yanai, and Xu set our to evaluate “the associations between garden factors (i.e., garden visit frequency and perceived garden quality) and older adults’ [mean age 79] psychological well-being outcomes (i.e., positive well-being and self-rated health) and to investigate the mediating role of neighborhood social environment factors (i.e., outing frequency, social participation, perceived neighborhood social cohesion, and perceived neighborhood attachment) in these associations. . . .  both garden factors were positively associated with positive well-being and self-rated health. . . . higher garden visit frequency and perceived garden quality were associated with higher outing frequency and perceived neighborhood social cohesion and, in turn, with higher positive well-being. Moreover, higher garden visit frequency and perceived garden quality were associated with greater social participation and thereby with better self-rated health; higher perceived garden quality was also associated with higher perceived neighborhood attachment and thus with better self-rated health.” Jiao Guo, Shigeto Yanai, and Guolin Xu.  “Community Gardens and Psychological Well-Being Among Older People in Elderly Housing with Care Services:  The Role of the Social Environment.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102232 

A Heffler-lead team determined that “Greater early-life digital media exposures may be associated with atypical sensory processing. Further research is needed to understand why early media exposure is associated with specific sensory-related behaviors, including those seen in autism spectrum disorder, and if minimizing screen media at a young age can improve subsequent sensory-related outcomes.” Data about TV and video exposures were collected at 12, 18, and 24 months old and regarding sensory processing at around 33 months old. Karen Heffler, Binod Acharya, Keshab Subbedi, and David Bennett.  2024. “Early-Life Digital Media Experiences and Development of Atypical Sensory Processing.”  JAMA Pediatrics, doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.5923

De la Osa and team collected data from children 3 – 11 years old: “Exposure to greenspace has been associated with mental health benefits in children; however, the available evidence for such an association with anxiety is still scarce. . . . [In the de la Osa-lead study] Long-term exposure to greenspace was characterized at both residential address and school as (i) surrounding greenspace based on satellite-derived indexes (normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and Vegetation Continuous Field (VCF) across different buffers and (ii) distance to the nearest green space. . . . Higher greenspace surrounding home and school were associated with lower levels of anxiety. Our findings suggest that increasing exposure to greenspace, specially at schools, could be included in preventive policies to promote mental health in children.” Nuria de la Osa, Jose-Blas Navarro, Eva Pennelo, Antonia Valenti, Lourdes Ezpeleta, and Payam Dadavand. 2024. “Long-Term Exposure to Greenspace and Anxiety from Preschool and Primary School Children.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 93, 102207, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102207

A team of researchers from the University of Exeter “analysed data . . . collected as part of the BBC’s . . . Forest 404. . . .Participants listened to a range of environments in the study, from coastal and woodland settings in the UK, to a tropical rainforest in Papua New Guinea. . . . Participants reported therapeutic effects from listening to landscape elements such as breaking waves or falling rain. Hearing wildlife in these environments, and birdsong in particular, enhanced their potential to provide recovery from stress and mental fatigue. . . . Those who had memories triggered by the sounds not only found them more restorative, but this increase in ‘therapeutic potential’ fed directly into their desire to protect the soundscapes. . . . soundscapes without the sounds of wildlife . . . reduced this potential for psychological benefits, with people’s motivation to protect those ecosystems also appearing to follow suit.” “Sounds of Nature Benefit Mental Health and Promote Environmental Protection.”  2022. Press release, University of Exeter, https://news-archive.exeter.ac.uk/homepage/title_904910_en.html

Khoury reports that “Flies are more than a nuisance. They are the carriers and transmitters of numerous diseases, including particularly dangerous ones such as cholera, typhoid, and gastrointestinal illnesses. . . . In hot, humid countries like Indonesia, flies are a part of everyday life. . . . Many school canteens are open-air, making it even easier for flies to access the food. . . . After observing plates of food on either a brown wooden table or a similar table painted bright yellow, the flies clearly preferred the food on the brown table. With that insight, the Dulux team worked with several schools to transform their canteens. From this idea came social enterprise Yellow Canteen, and the project paints tables, benches, walls, and other structures in school canteens the same cheery, bright yellow.” Keely Khoury. 2023. “Yellow Canteens:  A Colourful Way to Keep Kids Healthy.”  Spring Wise,https://www.springwise.com/innovation/education/painting-canteens-yellow-to-keep-kids-healthy/?utm_source=Springwise&utm_campaign=e0a97af838-SW_NEWSLETTER_2023_12_13_WEEKLY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f6c01573c7-e0a97af838-359865086&mc_cid=e0a97af838&mc_eid=d5f82c8041

Groth, Block, and Newman state that “The explosion in digitization means that individuals increasingly have the opportunity to choose between digital and physical versions of creative works—for example, between eBooks and paperback books. However, despite the popularity of digital objects, many people continue to prefer physical equivalents. We suggest that one reason for this preference is that physical versions of works are felt to embody the essence of their creators. Across six studies, we find that physical versions of creative works are indeed seen as embodying the essence of the creator, and as a result, are perceived to be more authentic instantiations of the creative work as compared to digital versions.” Oden Groth, Lauren Block, and George Newman.  “Los in Digitization:  The Physical Format of Creative Work Affects Authenticity Perceptions.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000628

Humans have lots of skin, with lots of nerves embedded in it.  All those nerves are churning away, second after second, sending millions of impulses to your brain – giving you all sorts of information about the world around you. When we’re selecting the materials/products that are nerve endings are reading – that new dining room table or countertop, replacement knobs for kitchen drawers, the travel case for our laptop that we’ll lift time after time, etc.—we often don’t put much thought into what they will feel like, what signals the nerve endings in our fingertips will pull from them and how the messages gleaned will influence how we think and behave. But we should. Our sense of touch, the tactile information that we process, can have just as much effect on how we live our lives, and whether we enjoy what we’re up to, as what we see, hear, smell, and taste. Touch often seems to be the forgotten sense.  Called to mind only when something is too itchy to experience for even a minute more and not otherwise. We all have the same number of nerve endings in the tips of our fingers and if our fingers are…

Textures on surfaces are often seen, so they influence how people think and behave, even if no one ever reaches out to touch them: We prefer glossy surfaces to ones that are matte so they brighten our mood as long as they don’t generate glare. If the walls in a room have rougher texture, that space is judged as more spacious than an area of exactly the same size that has smooth walls. Shiny surfaces, particularly underfoot, are often felt to be slippery, whether they actually are or are not. Textures often form patterns.We’ve written about patterns multiple times, for example here.  Some things to know about patterns you may find in textures: Curvier ones are linked to viewers feeling relaxed and more comfortable, ones with more straight lines and sharper angles are linked to encouraging efficient action and functionality.Curved patterns are also generally preferred to more angular ones.  Curvier patterns are seen as more feminine and angular options as more masculine. Humans also enjoy seeing symmetrical things, whether that symmetry is mirror, radial, or some other type.They are also perceived to be more beautiful and seeing them is apt to put us in a better mood.  We tie asymmetry…

In 2023, researchers have reported that: Symmetrical things seem more functional and reliable and asymetical ones more fun and exciting—useful information when you’re making choices. At-work sound volumes of about 50 dBA are best; at these sound levels wellbeing is optimized. We’re most relaxed in spaces where sunlight penetration levels are around 15-25% of floor area. Looking at moving water for as little as 3 minutes can promote mental health.Listening to the sound of gently moving water is more relaxing than even listening to bird sounds; research consistently shows that hearing the sorts of natural sounds that might be present in a meadow on a pleasant-weather Spring day is mentally refreshing and calming. When we can see beautiful nature (that’s nature our society finds beautiful) we’re more likely to persist at whatever work we are doing. We’re less stressed working in offices with wooden surfaces; research consistently shows that wood coverage of about 50% is best.Also, lighter/medium-colored woods produce better effects in offices than darker ones do. We prefer paintings with more curved elements in them to pieces with more angular ones. More saturated colours are likely to make people feel more energized and are also associated with feeling happy.Less…

As you move through the Winter months where you live, you may find conversations with those you’re “cooped up” with getting a little tense.  Some science-based suggestions for smoothing your interactions with those you’re sharing (an often too small) space with, with various levels of easy-to-execute-ness include: Adding warmer colors to surfaces—that’ll increase the likelihood of positive discussions as the people you’re talking with will themselves seem warmer. Warmer, dimmer light, as from a candle or a fire, is relaxing and has been tied to behaving in more socially positive ways. Make sure that all people participating in a conversation are seated on surfaces the same height above the floor (in other words, in chairs/on sofas with chairs that are all about the same length or all on pillows on the floor)—that way no one is looked up to or down on, with obvious effects on perceptions of the contributions they’re making to a conversation. Seat everyone so that they can make ready eye contact or are around a round table—and having a table between people can actually be a good thing when conversations get tough, because that furniture can create needed psychological distance.If two people or so will be…

Pantone has named their colour of the year for 2024 – Peach Fuzz (visible here: https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year/2024?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAj_CrBhD-ARIsAIiMxT-Srg5ERWiVQ_tNUUMnjWt_lx8EBYLwJ0511CQeVK2yE55oN6TMUFoaAo_BEALw_wcB). Sometimes the colours of the year that Pantone selects seem, well, wacky, but this year’s seems right on the mark.  It is the sort of unsaturated light color that science indicates is relaxing to look at and we can all use to feel a little more relaxed as 2024 unfolds, with scheduled elections, etc. Pantone describes their colour of the year like this: “PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul. . . . Peach Fuzz is a heartfelt peach hue bringing a feeling of kindness and tenderness, communicating a message of caring and sharing, community and collaboration.  A warm and cosy shade highlighting our desire for togetherness with others or for enjoying a moment of stillness and the feeling of sanctuary this creates. . . . Peach Fuzz inspires belonging, recalibration, and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, and heal and to flourish from.”

Gungormus and colleagues link planting trees to experiencing less pain: “Sensory stimulation has shown the capacity to modulate pain mechanisms. . . . A single-group, pretest-posttest clinical trial was used. . . . healthy adults performed an afforestation activity for 90 minutes. . . . results showed significant reductions in the cold pain intensity at the moment of detection . . . mechanical pain sensitivity . . . and increases in the thresholds of pressure pain detection . . . and tolerance. . . . Afforestation activities serve as an environmental strategy to transform barren landscapes into thriving forest ecosystems. . . . [It] involves human-led interventions such as planting, intentional seeding, and encouraging natural seed sources within a designated timeframe. . . .  The intervention comprised tillage and transplantation activities—from pot to ground—at several locations in the campus green space.” Dogukan Gungormus, Laura Sanchez-Bermejo, and Jose Perez-Marmol.  2024. “Effects of an Afforestation Activity on Thermal and Mechanical Pain Mechanisms:  A Clinical Trial.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 93, 102196, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102196

Sleboda and team’s work may be handy as you attempt to convince your family and friends to act in more environmentally responsible ways.  The researchers collected data as “Participants chose between one gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy and another with meat and dairy. . . . the gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy was less likely to be chosen when its label focused on its content (stating ‘vegan’ or ‘plant-based’) rather than on its benefits (stating ‘healthy’, ‘sustainable’ or both). Specifically, the ‘plant-based’ label did only slightly better than the ‘vegan’ label, leading, respectively, to 27% and 20% of participants choosing the gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy. However, 42% of participants chose the gourmet food gift basket without meat and dairy when it was labeled ‘healthy,’ 43% when it was labeled ‘sustainable,’ and 44% when it was labeled ‘healthy and sustainable.’” Patrycja Sleboda, Wandi de Bruin, Tania Gutsche, and Joseph Arvai.  “Don’t Say ‘Vegan’ or ‘Plant-Based’:  Food Without Meat and Dairy Is More Likely to Be Chosen When Labeled as ‘Healthy’ and ‘Sustainable.’” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102217

Zushi’s team shares that “Prior research indicate that emotional states can alter taste perception, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. . . . The first experiment investigated how anxiety affects taste perception when individuals are aware of their anxiety. Participants watched videos inducing relaxation or anxiety, then were divided into groups focusing on their emotions and those who did not, and the taste perception was measure. The second experiment investigated the influence of awareness directed toward emotions on taste evaluation, without manipulating emotional states. This focused on cognitive processing of taste through evaluations of visual stimuli. Results showed that sweetness perception is suppressed by the evocation of anxiety, whereas bitterness perception is enhanced only by anxiety with awareness.” Naoya Zushi, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, and Saho Ayabe-Kanamura.  “The Effects of Anxiety on Taste Perception:  The Role of Awareness.”  i-Perception, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695231216370

If you’re interested in synaesthesia, take a look at Cytowic’s work, available at the link, below.  Cytowic shares that “Synaesthesia has already caused a paradigm shift in two senses. For science, it has forced a fundamental rethinking about how brains are organized. It is now beyond dispute that cross talk happens in all brains; synesthetes just have more of it that takes place in existing circuits. The other paradigm shift lies within each individual. What synesthesia shows is that not everyone sees the world as you do. . . . Synesthesia highlights how each brain filters the world in its own uniquely subjective way.” Richard Cytowic.  2023. “A Brief 200-Year History of Synesthesia.” The MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-200-year-history-of-synesthesia/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=a%20brief%20200-year%20history%20of%20synesthesia.&utm_campaign=Newsletter_2%20column%20equal

Zhou and Pan report that “participants were tested under different illuminance levels and correlated color temperatures (CCT) for three distinct reading durations. Reading efficiency during the task tests and objective measures of brain activity by monitoring participants’ electroencephalograms (EEGs) were used as key factors to assess participants’ fatigue levels. By analyzing the subjective and objective results, we found that paper reading efficiency was significantly affected by changes in the lighting environment. Also, based on the results of this study, we propose lighting recommendations for paper reading tasks of different durations. For a 15-minute reading task, the lighting condition of 500 lux-6500 K were the most efficient for reading; for a 30-minute reading task, 500 lux-4000 K lighting environments were found to be the most effective; and 750 lux-6500 K was the best lighting environment for a 60-minute reading duration.” Anqi Zhou and Younghwan Pan. 2023. “Effects of Indoor Lighting Environments on Paper Reading Efficiency and Brain Fatigue:  An Experimental Study.”  Frontiers in Built Environment, vol. 9, doi:10.3389/fbuil.2023.1303028

As one year ends and another begins we’re driven to think about the high and low points of the last 12 months and to plan for the next 12, and beyond.  All of which leads to New Year’s resolutions, specific plants for making the next year more successful (however we define success) than the last. Since design has such a big effect on how we think and behave, starting 2024 off with plans to elevate design-based experiences makes lots of sense. As 2024 dawns: Really and carefully consider how the spaces you control can move your life in the directions you’d like it to go. Do you need to create a place in your home to meditate?  (If your answer to this question is “yes,” read this article.) To really concentrate on work you’ve brought home from the office?  (If so, read this article). To get your health in hand and eat healthy food? (For more related info on this topic, read this article.) Over the years, the Space Doctors have profiled in depth how to accomplish each of these things and many more.  Use the search box at the top of this page to steer yourself to the information…

Looking for tips for keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Look no further: Open the curtains and let in the natural light. We not only process information more effectively in natural light, our cognitive performance is better, but we also get along better with other people when we’re bathed in natural light – which is often good for keeping resolutions.  Too dark for natural light to help? Turn on some more lights, make your space brighter, you’ll have more self-control. You’ll feel more powerful in a space that features cool colours, which gives you added strength to live in line with your resolutions. Research also shows we’re less impulsive in mainly cool-coloured spaces than we are than warmer-coloured ones. Bring down the visual clutter/disorder where you are by straightening things up and putting away things you’re not using (managing visual complexity is discussed here; also search for “visual complexity top right,) or try our new i-Journal to create your own report!). Set up a piece of art with a face with eyes so that those eyes seem to be looking at you as you’re tempted to transgress, for example, to make less healthy food selections. Landscape art that’s refreshing to look…

As The Space Doctors has discussed oodles of times, human beings continually “read” the world around themselves, trying to determine what it has to “say.” All of which sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo, hardly worth the number of pixels required to communicate it. But it’s not. The film industry knows how much skill we have deciphering the signals being sent by design—that’s why they have whole sets of people to create sets used—and why they pay those people so well. And you yourself have actively read environments in which you’ve found yourself, even if you haven’t thought about situations in those terms.  For example, have you ever interviewed for a job and not felt good about joining a firm because of how you felt in their offices? Listing what anything that we might find around us, in real life, means would require an immense dictionary.  But you already hold that dictionary of things in your head just as you possess the dictionary of words that you use to understand what people are saying around you and what you read. You also possess, in your mind, probably, dictionaries that you use to understand words in different languages—and the meanings attached…

The research is very clear that being active, really using your muscles throughout the day, has all sorts of benefits beyond burning calories (although burning calories is indeed a good thing). Taking a walk, for example, indoors or outside, on a treadmill or not, has been shown to help our brains work more effectively and also to boost creativity, for example, while we’re walking and for a while afterwards—so creating opportunities to walk, with exercise equipment or paths through your home or yard is well worth the effort. Another way that you can use your muscles throughout the day if you don’t happen to spend your days as a professional speed skating or doing something else that keeps you on the go for hour after hour is to work at a sit-stand desk.  Changing from standing to sitting and sitting to standing can help you more comfortable as you use different sets of muscles for each. There is some evidence that doing so is good for work that requires concentration/focus and also that just having the choice of when to stand and when to sit can do all sorts of desirable things to the performance of your brain.

Want to feel warmer?  Make sure you’re surrounded by warm colours and nix the cooler ones.  The difference in perceived temperatures can be as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Similarly, when we see images of warm places or other reminders of warm parts of the world, we feel warmer, even without changing the temperature on the thermostat. Heat up your world by ditching the surfaces that feel cold to the touch like metals and make sure you have plenty of those that seem warmer, like wood.  Best of all are options that both feel warm initially and retain the heat of your body after you’ve touched them—again natural materials can work well. No time to paint or add stuff?  Open the curtains.  We think spaces are warmer when they are naturally lit than when they’re not.

When biophilic design principles are applied at places where people are learning and teaching, good things happen—moods and cognitive performance improve (for students and teachers!)—which is always a plus, whether trigonometry or Latin grammar or colour theory feature in the lesson plan for the day. When schools are biophilically designed they feature: Loads of natural light but mechanisms to eliminate glare. Natural light is great for elevating our mental performance, whether you’re trying to think creatively or not, but glare causes stress and stress keeps us from performing to our full potential.  Adding blinds can eliminate glare (but ones that return to the up position automatically are best because once people pull down blinds they often don’t return them to their original position) and so can set up desks, screens, etc. at an angle from windows.  Clerestory windows, which are smaller and placed on walls above adult standing eye level, can help keep glare down while admitting natural light, but they can’t let in views.  If people will be in school at night, circadian lighting is a big plus for a space. It’s great when schools can be located with views of nature outside; views of at least 50 feet…

The neuroscience research makes it very, very clear that being in a biophilicly designed space elevates our wellbeing. Need proof of the value of indoor biophilicly designed spaces?  Here’s a representative sample of research project findings: People feel very comfortable in biophilicly designed spaces (Kellert, 2012). So comfortable that the odds increase dramatically that they get along well with other people and their brains work to their full potential, for example. Joye (2007) reports, in general, that biophilic design has a positive effect on human emotional and cognitive functioning; Determan Akers, Albright, Browning, Martin-Dunlop, Archibald, and Caruolo (2019) identified the same effects in children in biophilicly designed classrooms. HyunLee (2019) determined that people staying in a biophilicly designed hotel were in better moods than people staying in other places. The amount of stress we’re experiencing is likely at lower, manageable levels in biophilicly designed spaces (Wijesooriya and Brambilla, 2021), which can have desirable effects on our health as well as our minds. Wijesooriya and Brambilla also found that biophilic design improves our mood, cognitive performance, and creativity. Being in a biophilicly designed space decreases blood pressure while improving memory performance (Yin, Zhu, MacNaughton, Allen, and Spengler, 2018). After we’ve been…

What could be more biophilic than a treehouse? In October, Tow Vanderbilt reported on the treehouses designed by Takeshi Kobayashi (“A Treehouse Builder Who Creates Impermanence:  Japan’s Takashi Kobayashi Has Found Freedom in the Canopies,” 2023, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/t-magazine/takashi-kobayashi-treehouses.html  ). Vanderbilt shares that “Treehouses stir some primordial instinct; the protohuman Australopithecus erected night nests in trees. Our shoulders seem built for brachiation, and the human hand today, with its ridged palms and the ability to grasp between the thumb and first digit, still bears the traces, notes Frank R. Wilson in ‘The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture’  (1988),  of an evolutionary move that ‘permitted improved climbing and locomotion along trunks and branches.’ The publication in German, in 1813, of the novel ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ — about a family marooned on a remote isle — sparked the first modern vogue for treehouses. With industrialization, they came to stand as a sort of symbol for the lost vitality of our engagement with the natural world.”

M. Brown, in a recent article in The New York Times reviews recent efforts by many to link their locations/products/services to specific scents in consumers’ minds (“When You Think About Your Credit Card, Does a Fragrance Come to Mind?” 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/realestate/mastercard-fragrance-scent.html ). Over the last few decades, many sorts of organizations have been actively scentscaping environments they control to make desired outcomes (whether that’s increased sales or improved cognitive performance or something else entirely) more likely. As Brown reports in The New York Times article “Corporations are now mimicking fashion designers and hiring development firms to create a signature scent. . . . Companies using bespoke scents in their spaces are nothing new. Hotels that want to exude a sense of luxurious relaxation have been designing their own candles for decades, and no one who stepped into an Abercrombie & Fitch store in the 2000s will ever forget the olfactory sting of the brand’s musky cologne that fogged their retail stores.  But smell is increasingly becoming part of the brand strategy for companies in unexpected industries, as brands jostle for precious slivers of market share and especially as workers and clients begin to trickle back into office spaces. So the…

Yang, Sedikides, Wang, and Cai “formulated several hypotheses: (a) nature fosters authenticity, and it does so through at least four plausible mechanisms: self-esteem, basic needs satisfaction (autonomy, competence, relatedness), mindfulness, and positive affect; (b) self-esteem is the strongest mechanism overall, and autonomy is the strongest mechanism of the three basic needs . . . and (d) authenticity mediates the positive influence of nature on longer term psychological well-being (higher life satisfaction and meaning in life, lower depression, anxiety, and stress). We obtained support for these hypotheses across 12 studies. . . . These were diverse in terms of setting (field, laboratory) . . . methodology (varying manipulations of nature . . .), and sampling (university/community, East Asian/Western). The findings establish nature as a correlate and determinant of authenticity, chiefly via the mechanism of self-esteem, and further establish authenticity . . . as a mediator of the positive influence of nature on psychological well-being.” Ying Yang, Constantine Sedikides, Yugi Wang, and Huajian Cai.  “Nature Nurtures Authenticity:  Mechanisms and Consequences.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000432

Researchers have learned more about how who we are influences how we write about nature; the same demographic factors likely influence thinking more generally.  A Langer lead team found that “female authors tend to use more species names when they write. . . . The researchers . . . explain how factors such as the author’s gender, place of residence or age influence the importance given to nature in their works. . . . [the researchers] found that, on average, works written by women contained more biodiversity than those written by men across all the periods analysed. . . . the researchers found more occurrences of nature in the works of North American authors than in European works. In addition, writers from smaller towns tended to describe more biodiversity in their work than those living in larger cities. . . . on average, young authors under 25 and older authors over 70 wrote about plants and animals more often than middle-aged authors.” “Female Authors Tend to Use More Species Names When They Write.”  2023. Press release, Universitat Leipzig, https://www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetail/artikel/female-authors-tend-to-use-more-species-names-when-they-write-2023-11-13

Chatterjee, Mishra, and Mishra share that “Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person’s own name. . . . To examine whether the effect occurs in the real world, we use large language models trained on Common Crawl, Twitter, Google News, and Google Books using two natural language processing word-embedding algorithms (word2vec and GloVe). After controlling for relevant variables, we find consistent evidence of the relationship between people’s names and a preference for major life choices starting with the same letter as their first name.” Promothesh Chatterjee, Himanshu Mishra, and Arul Mishra.  2023. “Does the First Letter of One’s Name Affect Life Decisions?  A Natural Language Processing Examination of Nominative Determinism.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 125, no. 5, pp. 943-968, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000347

Danvers and colleagues learned that “spending more than 75% of time alone was associated with much higher loneliness scores. . . . people who spend very much or very little of their time surrounded by others tend to report the greatest loneliness. . . . loneliness is particularly high among people who spend a very high proportion of their time alone (more than approximately 75% of their waking hours). Spending a moderate amount of time alone (from approximately 25% to 75% of waking hours) was associated with comparably low rates of loneliness. Spending very little time alone . . . is also associated with slightly elevated levels of loneliness. . . . results indicate that the point of transition was 40.4 years of age. Below this age, the relationship between loneliness and time spent alone was not significant. . . . Above this age, the relationship between loneliness and time spent alone was significant.” Andexander Danvers, Liliane Efinger, Matthias Mehl, Peter Helm, Charles Raison, Angelina Polsinelli, Suzanne Moseley, and David Sbarra. 2023. “Loneliness and Time Alone in Everyday Life:  A Descriptive-Exploratory Study of Subjective and Objective Social Isolation.”  Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 107, 104426, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2023.104426

Lopez, Choi, Dellawar, Cullen, Contreras, Rosenfeld, and Tomiyama’s report that “Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. In a seminal study by Wansink et al. (2005), researchers used self-refilling bowls to assess how visual cues of portion size would influence intake. The study found that participants who unknowingly ate from self-refilling bowls ate more soup than did participants eating from normal (not self-refilling) bowls. Despite consuming 73% more soup, however, participants in the self-refilling condition did not believe they had consumed more soup, nor did they perceive themselves as more satiated than did participants eating from normal bowls. . . .  We found that most results [of the Wansink-lead study] replicated. . .  results suggest that eating can be strongly controlled by visual cues, which can even override satiation.” Alejandra Lopez, Alyssa Choi, Nadia Dellawar, Brooke Cullen, Sonia Contreras, Daniel Rosenfeld, and A. Tomiyama.  “Visual Cues and Food Intake:  A Preregistered Replication of Wansink et al. (2005).”  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001503

Nurmi and Pakarinen’s work “challenge[s] the commonly held belief that virtual meeting fatigue manifests as exhaustion (i.e., active fatigue) resulting from overloading demands and instead suggest that participation in virtual meetings may lead to increased drowsiness (i.e., passive fatigue) due to underload of stimulation. Using subjective and cardiac measures (heart rate variability), we investigated the relationships between virtual versus face-to-face meetings and different types of fatigue (active and passive) among . . . knowledge workers during real-life meetings. . . . analys[es] revealed a link between virtual meetings and higher levels of passive fatigue, which then impacted cognitive performance. . . . work engagement . . . [explains] why some knowledge workers are affected, while others are not. Given the growing amount of time spent in virtual meetings, these findings emphasize the risks to mental energy and cognitive performance and highlight the protective role of high general work engagement.” Niina Nurmi and Satu Pakarinen. 2023. “Virtual Meeting Fatigue: Exploring the Impact of Virtual Meetings on Cognitive Performance and Active Versus Passive Fatigue.”  Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000362   

Ward and teammates found that “Odors for instance are often perceived with visual cues; these sensations interact to form our own subjective experience. This integration process can have a profound impact on the resulting experience and can alter our subjective reality. . . . Vision is dominant in our multisensory perception and can influence how we perceive information in our other senses, including olfaction. We explored the effect that different odors have on human color perception by presenting olfactory stimuli while asking observers to adjust a color patch to be devoid of hue (neutral gray task). . . . For instance, when asking observers to perform the neutral gray task while presenting the smell of cherry, the perceptually achromatic stimulus was biased toward a red-brown.”  When study participants the odor of caramel was associated with dark brown, the odor of cherry with pink, red, and purple, lemon with yellow, green, and pink and peppermint with green and blue, for example.  So, while smelling coffee, a gray square was seen as more reddish-brown in color than when study participants were not smelling the coffee. Ryan Ward, Maliha Ashraf, Sophie Wuerger, and Alan Marshall.  2023. “Odors Modulate Color Appearance.” Frontiers in Psychology,…

The season of mingling is upon us!  It seems that most of us pack in the majority of time we spend socializing with others during the last few months of the year. People have a powerful drive to socialize with each other, even the most introverted, introverted among us need to spend time with other humans, as the need strikes us.  No human is ultimately a human without other humans. That socializing can go better or worse, depending on not only the people doing it, but also on the design of the place where they are. How can design make mingling magnificent? We do our best mingling in spaces that “say” the things about ourselves and the groups that we’re members of that we want them to hear. That means that they let others know that we are proud of our Lithuanian heritage or our family’s accomplishments hiking during our last vacation or the books that we’ve written.  Everything that surrounds us sends messages to those who are close enough to take in that information.  Even the smell of our house is a signal:  Is it clean and fresh, indicating that we’re a determined house cleaner, is it subtly sophisticated…

Mingling means sharing spaces, etc., and the personalities of the people doing that sharing and the design of the space being shared can have a major effect on how well it all goes. People who are extraverted thrive in spaces which are much more energizing (for more information on whether experiences are energizing or relaxing, read this article) while people who are more introverted do best when they are able to carefully curate their sensory experiences. Extraverts draw energy from being with others and derive a lot of pleasure from doing just that. Introverts, who have a rich inner world benefit from spending time on their own. Extraverts prefer open environments, say open floorplan homes with combined living and dining areas, while introverts live their best lives in more segmented floorplans. While extraverts can’t get enough of sofas where they can cosy up to whomever they’re speaking with, for introverts a nice chair is great (and it’s even better if that chair has arms). One person per seating surface, please, is an introvert mantra. For more information on determining someone’s personality, read this article.

Men and women can experience spaces in different ways for physiological reasons that seem quite distinct from their sexual preferences. Because female fingers tend to be smaller than male ones (women are often shorter than men), they have a better sense of touch, they may perceive textures on surfaces differently than men because both have the same number of nerve endings in their fingers but in women those nerve endings are clustered more closely together. A chair arm that might seem fine to a male group might seem scratchy or itchy or otherwise undesirable to women, for example. Women have a more acute sense of smell than men, so an air freshener in a living room that seems just right to a male guest may seem way too strong for female guests. Women excel at distinguishing one colour from another, especially different sorts of red shades (men’s visual superpowers are being more sensitive to fine detail and to picking out rapidly moving things), so a colour combination that may seem great to a male host may grate on the nerves of a female guest. Men are more likely to be colour-blind than women. Men are more likely to become hard…

Invited to a party at the home of someone with design training and feeling all is not quite right? Designing training causes us to find different aspects of interiors familiar—and we like what’s familiar. This means that designers may choose options for their own homes, etc., that seem novel or unusual compared to those freely chosen by people with less training. Being an expert can also cause us to see the world differently, quite literally.   People who have designing training may pay attention to things such as the stitching on sofa cushions that people without their training just do not pick up—which is all fine if those stitches are straight and the same size, etc., but not so good if they’re out of alignment or otherwise wonky.

When we’re mingling we’re often cooking and eating.  How do the food smells we’re likely to encounter influence our time with others? Scents that make us feel nostalgic improve our mood, whether those scents are from food or something else. They also boost our self-esteem, optimism, and social connections to others. Sweet orange, that’s the scent of the fruit that we normally eat, reduces anxiety levels. So does the smell of vanilla. The scents of lemon and mango are relaxing. The smell of rosemary enhances memory performance. So do the scents of sage and peppermint.  Smelling peppermint and, separately, smelling rosemary have both been linked to feeling more alert. Smelling coffee makes us more alert and improves our performance of analytical tasks. The scent of chocolate and also of peppermint can improve performance on more mundane cognitive-type work (and peppermint can also help with physical tasks). Lemon boosts mood and performance on cognitive/mental tasks. We feel more energetic when we smell grapefruit, tangerines, and peppermint. The scent of green apple makes a space seem larger. We feel thinner when we smell lemon and heavier when the scent of vanilla is in the air.

A place where you feel nostalgic can be good for your mental performance as well as your soul. Sensory design can make nostalgic experiences more or less likely.  Scents can lead to nostalgic thinking for groups of people, for example, and so can seeing memory-evoking images.    And when people are nostalgic they’re more apt to: Think more creatively. Have higher levels of self-esteem and optimism Be in better moodsnce… Feel more connected to other people Believe that their lives are meaningful. Feel less lonely. Feel physically warmer.

Lundberg, Craig, and Peloza share that “Across four studies, we find evidence for a positive relationship between temperature and risk-taking, using multiple operationalizations of temperature and measurements of risk. . . . In particular, thermal imagery is promising, as the use of imagery is ubiquitous throughout the marketplace. . . . By leveraging the flexibility of warm thermal imagery, marketers may activate their patrons’ inclination toward seeking rewards and taking more chances. . . . temperature manipulations do not need to be extreme or induce discomfort, but merely make a given thermal state salient to consumers.”  The researchers collected information on days when outside temperatures were different, when study participants were touching heat packs or not, when ambient temperatures ranged from 66 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, and after participants had seen “two 30-second slideshows to mirror one another while reflecting warm (e.g., desert, campfire) or cool (ice, snow) environmental temperatures,” (these are examples of thermal imagery), for example. Josh Lundberg, Adam Craig, and John Peloza.  2023. “Strike While the Iron is Hot:  Temperature Affects Consumers’ Appetite for Risk.”  Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21905

Trawinski and colleagues had British and Chinese people look at Western representational paintings and report that “Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed the paintings with each painting split into face, theme of the painting and its context regions of interest (ROIs). . . . With respect to the time-course of fixations across ROIs, Chinese participants focused more on the theme, and less on faces (and vice-versa for British participants), in a period starting around 2 s after the onset of viewing. Earlier in viewing there was evidence that Chinese participants had an increased focus on the context. The results (a) extend the findings reported by Trawiński, Zang, et al. (2021) on the impact of the Other Race Effect on the viewing of paintings; (b) show the time course associated with a more general cross-cultural influence on scene perception (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001).”  These findings are consistent with previous studies which found that people raised in Asia process scenes more holistically while people raised in the West (North America, Europe) are more likely to pay most attention to focal elements present. Tobiasz Trawinski, Chuanli Zang, Simon Liversedge, Yao Ge, and Nick Donnelly. 2023. “The Time-Course of Fixations in Representational Paintings: …

Dai and colleagues found that “It is common that marketers design and position pretty products more to female consumers than to male consumers, suggesting they generally believe that females have a stronger preference than males for product form over function and apply this belief to their marketing practices. However, this research demonstrates that this belief is often inconsistent with actual preferences. Across seven studies and four follow-up studies, involving both hypothetical and field settings, we demonstrate that both marketers and consumers hold such a belief about gender difference and overpredict females’ preference for form-superior (vs. function-superior) products relative to males. Specifically, people tend to choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for female (vs. male) others, but female consumers do not choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for themselves more than do male consumers.” Xianchi Dai, Yu Lin, Jianpink Liang, and Chen Yang.  “Appearance for Females, Functionality for Males? The False Lay Belief About Gender Differences in Product Preference.”  Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad054

Michels and colleagues share that “Before and after Trier Social Stress Test, 91 participants . . . inhaled one odor during 10 min: Scots pine, grass . . . or control (i.e., demineralized water). . . . Both nature olfactory exposures improved some stress outcomes. Both were associated with lower cortisol in non-stress conditions, but only grass odor was more beneficial for negative affect [mood] decrease after stress. No effect on heart rate variability was seen. . . . In non-stress situations, grass odor increased vegetable preference, while the pine odor group had higher sweet high-fat snack preference. Grass odor was also reported to induce healthier food choices. During stress recovery, both pine and grass odor groups had higher preference to sweet high-fat snacks.” Nathalie Michels, Shania Boudrez, Paula Pineda, and Christophe Walgraeve. “Nature-Related Odors Influence Stress and Eating Behavior:  A Laboratory Experiment with Pine and Grass.”  Environment and Behavior, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231201608

Miniatures, the sorts of items that would be at home in the most intricate doll houses, are finding their ways into many retailers in North America—which is intriguing—are these tiny things helping us wax nostalgic or indicating our residential aspirations?  Maybe they’re becoming more plentiful for both reasons or another factor is in play. In “Recreating a Bygone China, One Miniature Home at a Time,” Wivian Wang (2023, The New York Times,https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/world/asia/china-miniature-homes-nostalgia.html) shares that there is a “growing community of artists in China filling an increasingly urgent demand: miniature replicas of homes that have been demolished, remodeled or otherwise swept away by China’s modernization.” Further info: “Designing and collecting miniatures has long been a hobby in the West. In northern Europe during the 17th century, dollhouses were a way for the wealthy to show off their properties; nowadays aficionados cite reasons ranging from escapism to aspirational interior design.  But in China, where artists say the form is relatively new, miniatures have become a way to reckon with a society that has changed at a dizzying pace. Over the past 40 years. . .  The share of city residents has tripled,  and vast numbers of Chinese have seen the structures of…

Design can encourage people to feel nostalgic, using images, objects, or scents, for example.  Abeyta and Juhl’s work, building on previous studies, “hypothesized that nostalgia, a bittersweet emotion that entails reflecting sentimentally on the past, helps restore meaning for lonely people. . . . Results [of two studies conducted] supported the hypothesis: The relation between loneliness and meaning deficits was reduced among nostalgic individuals and this was driven by the fact that nostalgia (whether measured or experimentally induced) was linked with greater meaning for highly lonely individuals.” Andrew Abeyta and Jabob Juhl. 2023. “Nostalgia Restores Meaning in Life for Lonely People.”  Emotion, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1791-1795, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001190

Rosa and teammates reviewed published studies and found that “some horticultural interventions plus usual care (i.e., continuing normal routine for healthy people or treatment for unhealthy ones) may reduce depressive symptoms more than usual care alone, with most studies suggesting a moderate . . . or large effect. . . .  Our findings suggest that some horticultural interventions are effective and safe to use as a complementary strategy to reduce adults’ depressive symptoms.” Claudio Rosa, Talisson Chaves, Silvia Collado, Lincoln Larson, Kangjae Lee, and Christina Profice.  2023. “Horticultural Interventions May Reduce Adults’ Depressive Symptoms:  A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 91, 102112, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102112

Di Dio and associates report that participants in their study “were asked to give beauty (BJ) and liking (LJ) judgments. . . . Aesthetic judgments were made in a blind-baseline condition, devoid of authorship information, and a primed condition, where authorship information (human or robot) was provided. . . . The human-authored paintings received a [significantly] higher liking rating in the primed than the blind and robot conditions; opposite, the robot-authored paintings received a lower beauty rating in the primed than the blind condition. These results suggest a resistance to accepting artificial intelligence in the production of art and highlight the emotional component associated with human art-making.” Cinzia Di Dio, Martina Ardizzi, Sara Schieppati, Davide Massaro, Gabriella Gilli, Vittorio Gallese, and Antonella Marchetti.  “Art Made by Artificial Intelligence:  The Effect of Authorship on Aesthetic Judgments.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000602

Konijnendijk reports that “Having trees and other vegetation in sight from one’s home, place of work, or school has important mental health and performance benefits. . . . With public green spaces in proximity to one’s home stimulates regular use of these areas and results in positive impacts on mental, physical, and social health. After analyzing existing guidelines and rules for urban green space planning and provision, a new, comprehensive guideline is presented, known as the ‘3–30–300 rule’ for urban forestry. This guideline aims to provide equitable access to trees and green spaces and their benefits by setting the thresholds of having at least 3 well-established trees in view from every home, school, and place of work, no less than a 30% tree canopy in every neighbourhood; and no more than 300 m to the nearest public green space from every residence.” Cecil Konijnendijk. 2023. “Evidence-Based Guidelines for Greener, Healthier, More Resilient Neighbourhoods:  Introducing the 3-30-300 Rule.”  Journal of Forestry Research, vol. 34, pp. 821-830, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-022-01523-z

Winn and colleagues report that “Natural materials, biomorphic forms, and the incorporation of plants and green elements are all strategies to implement biophilic design. Biophilic design can improve the cognitive and physiological health of individuals in interior environments. The purpose of this study was to assess if the integration of biophilic design in a virtual simulation of crew quarters on the International Space Station (ISS) can help improve emotions, while also improving cognitive and physiological responses in individuals. . . . The study found that there were statistically significant differences for emotions, including feelings of calm . . . content . . . nervousness . . . and indecisiveness . . . across the two environments. . . . Biophilic design could be beneficial for creating spaces that act as a human health countermeasure and to help ensure the wellbeing of astronauts and space travelers.” Audrey Winn, Aditya Jayadas, Tilanka Chandrasekera, and Sherry Thaxton. “Biophilic Interventions in Space Habitat Crew Quarters to Improve Cognitive and Physiological Health.”  IEEE Xplore, 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

Bailey, Anderson, and Cox “explore[d] the mechanisms of active and passive leisure influence through real-time tracking of mental states while incurring a standard ‘dose’ of social media and walking. Results indicate that social media induces anxiety and mental focus, while walking enhances relaxation and meditative state. Geographic information systems (GIS) reveal that natural elements along various urban walking routes are associated with higher inward attention, and that unimpeded greenways may be more mentally restorative than built environments.” Andrew Bailey, Madison Anderson and Garner Cox. 2023. “Influence of Activity and Space on Psychological Well-Being.”  Leisure Sciences, vol. 45, no. 8, pp. 724-742, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2021.1889421

When going outside can seem like a burden, looking at it from inside seems like a better and better option.  Take a minute now, while fixes are relatively easy and pleasant, to fine tune what your through-the-window experiences will be like. Think back to last winter -were there drafts around your windows?  Fix them now.  Drafts waste energy and make your space the wrong temperature for you to live your best life, they stress you out.  As discussed in this article, for brain and body to work well, being in a space that’s 72 degrees Fahrenheit with relative humidity between 40% and 70% is best. Before the winter onslaught begins, make sure your windows are clean, inside and out.  Streaks and dirt get especially annoying when they’re present for week after month.  Dirt may also, literally, destroy your view or keep natural light from flowing inside and can create glare.  And being in a dirty space is bad for your self-esteem and general wellbeing. All the effort required to bring glare-free natural light into your home is definitely worth it.  When we’re in natural light inside: Our brains work more effectively, our cognitive performance improves (we also learn better in…

The first language we speak can influence how we experience spaces and the objects in them for the rest of our lives. Our earliest language influences what we pay attention to (because we need to pick words for those situations) and what we expect as we live our lives. Language becomes a sort of lens through which we perceive our world. Some examples of how follow. Talking colour: How our first language categorises colours is really important.  Regardless of the language we speak we’ll all actually see the same colours, but we’ll talk about them differently based on how we’ve learned to categorize them with the colour words we learn.  For example, some languages actually use the same colour to label things that are blue and things that are green. If in our first language there are completely different words for light and dark blue (in other words, these shades are not distinguished just with an adjective), we’ll really quickly distinguish and label light and dark blues for the rest of our lives. Some languages categorise nouns as masculine or as feminine.  If you speak French, or Spanish, or German, or many other languages, you know that some things are…

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, both actual and virtual. Social connection effects are observed with long-term nature exposure, such as neighbourhood greenspace. . . .  As members of a social species, the quality of our interpersonal relationships and a general sense of connection to others are essential for overall health. Relationships influence both physical and mental health. . . . strong relationships reduce the risk of depression . . . and other mental illnesses. . . . Social health is as crucial to flourishing as are physical and mental health. . . . Prosocial behavior describes action that serves the needs of others, such as helpfulness, generosity, cooperation, and altruism. Antisocial behavior, conversely, harms other people and includes behaviors such as aggression and crime.” Katherine Arbuthnott.  “Nature Exposure and Social Health:  Prosocial Behavior, Social Cohesion, and Effect Pathways.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102109

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 year after the original study in 2020, we collected matched data from . . . people living in Germany in 2021. We again found that garden owners had significantly greater life satisfaction and better mental well-being than non-garden owners. . . . garden owners spent substantially more time in their garden than non-garden owners spent in public green spaces. . . .  By pooling the data from 2020 to 2021, our . . .  analyses supported the main conclusion from the original study, i.e., garden owners’ greater life satisfaction and better mental well-being were attributable to the differences between the groups in sociodemographic factors (e.g., higher income), time spent outside (e.g., longer hours), and personality traits (e.g., less neuroticism).” Mira Lehberger and Kai Sparke.  “How Important Are Home Gardens and Spending Time Outside for Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic?  Comparing and Combining Data from 2020 to 2021.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102089

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 at Chalmers’ Division of Applied Acoustics have conducted a laboratory study in which test subjects took concentration tests while being exposed to background traffic noise. . . . subjects had significantly poorer results on the performance test, and also felt that the task was more difficult to carry out, with traffic noise in the background. . . . background noise consisted of two audio sequences simulating trucks passing by at a distance of ten and fifty metres. Both sequences were normalized to the same total indoor level of 40 dB. . . . The audio sequence simulating the closer passages, where the sound changes significantly as the vehicle passes by, was usually the one that bothered the test subjects the most.” “Even Weak Traffic Noise Has a Negative Impact on Work Performance.”  2023. Press release, Chalmers University of Technology, https://www.chalmers.se/en/current/news/ace-traffic-noise-impacts-performance/

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 and may help us effectively manage our diets—so pink has pluses, even without its cultural signalling power, which is more or less positive, depending on your worldview. In “The Colour Pink and How the New Barbie Film Might Subvert Our Expectations” (found at bbc.com, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230718-the-colour-pink-and-how-the-new-barbie-film-might-subvert-our-expectations) Clare Thorp notes that pink is “strongly associated with women” and  “It wasn’t always the way. . . . the girl-pink/boy-blue divide didn’t set in until the mid-20th Century.”  Thorp also reports that “Despite long being associated with submission and passivity, the colour pink has been reclaimed, symbolising subversiveness—which is embraced in the new Barbie film. . . . This inclusive and feminist take on Barbie – which also fully celebrates pink – looks set to be one of the biggest films of the summer, if not the year – and has the potential to be the most successful film ever by a female director. There’s nothing delicate, dainty or frivolous about that. Pink has rarely felt more powerful.”

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 nature conservatory compared to a [indoor] mall. . . . Participants felt closer to people nearby and around the world in the conservatory. . . . More social and environment connection occurred in more natural parks. . . . while visiting the conservatory, participants were less likely to think about themselves, felt closer to people nearby and around the world, and felt higher connectedness to their social and physical environment. . . . Participants . . . reported feeling higher levels of connection to nearby people and the physical environment when they were visiting city parks rated as more natural.” Kathryn Scherz and 15 others. 2023. “Nature’s Path to Thinking About Others and the Surrounding Environment.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 89, 102046, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102046

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 office work and increase their stress level and then had a rest period in an armchair in the same room. . . . The anxiety felt was clearly lower at the end of the experiment in the wooden room than in the control, while the other psychological measures showed only a slight indication that the wooden room was more beneficial for relaxation. Performances in sustained attention to the response task were similar in both rooms. . . . the results support slight positive effects of wooden material on mood on humans in the office environment. . .  In the wooden room, 50% of the surface material was pinewood.” No surfaces were wooden in the control room. Ann Ojala, Joel Kostensalo, Jari Viik, Hanna Matilainen, Ida Wik, Linda Virtanen, and Riina Muilu-Makela.  2023. “Psychological and Physiological Effects of a Wooden Office Room on Human Well-Being:  Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 89, 102059, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102059

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 creative responses. . . . nature-views significantly enhanced positive affect [mood] and reduced negative affect.  . . . These results indicate that affect, and specific cognitive processes, are restored [refreshed] by incorporating biophilic elements into architectural design. . . . Our findings, in concert with earlier work on this topic, indicate that, architects, interior designers, and developers should endeavour to incorporate window views of foliage and additional biophilic features within interior designs to enhance affect, cognitive performance, and wellbeing.” L. Sharam, K. Mayer, and O. Baumann.  2023. “Design By Nature:  The Influence of Windows on Cognitive Performance and Affect.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 85, 101923, pp. 1-10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101923

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 function more effectively, but it also makes your brain work better, helping with problem solving and creative thinking, for example, all while making it more likely that you’ll get along better with other people—even if you’re not a member of their fan club. The single most important thing you can do to keep your mental health in tip-top shape and yourself in maximum friendliness mode is to make sure that the space you’re in and the objects it contains send you—and others—positive messages about who you are and what matters to you. “Positive” is one of those mushy, many meaning words that psychologists love to use—but it doesn’t matter how the psychological world may think of describing “positive,” it matters how you yourself define it.  Proud of your accomplishments as an amateur musician?  Make sure visitors can see your cello, set up and ready to play.  Value your achievements as a sailor, maybe because you stuck with the sport despite challenges?  Put photos of you sailing…

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 lot of creative work, even tasks that have officially been delegated to a group, is actually done alone—the material in the next few paragraphs is relevant to both solo and group work areas.  And spaces that support creativity are great areas for innovation, as well. Research conducted to the highest standards by neuro-, cognitive, and social scientists, worldwide, makes it clear that people are most apt to think creatively in spaces that: Feature the colour green.Looking at the colour green has been tied to enhanced creative performance.  Among all the greens available, those that are not very saturated and relatively light are the best options.  These sorts of greens, an example of which is a sage green with lots of white mixed into it, create the optimum atmosphere for knowledge work generally—one where people are calm and collected enough to focus on whatever they’re endeavouring to accomplish, but not so relaxed that they fall asleep—and the use of a light colour on walls makes a space…

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 and swimming around seems like a pretty atypical wild swimming experience. What does the science say about wild swimming? Basically, that it’s a very good thing, for your mind and body—and how could it not be with all the positive “biophilics” present simultaneously when you swim in an outdoor waterhole:  hearing and seeing water, sunlight (probably, few swim outside in the dark), seeing green growing things nearby (again, probably, although less likely in Paris) . . . Multiple recent studies profile the social and physical benefits of wild swimming. For starters, McDougall, Foley, Hanley, Quilliam, and Oliver (2022) found “A growing body of evidence suggests immersion in blue space, e.g., participating in ‘wild’ swimming, can be particularly beneficial for both physical and mental health. . . . The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between loch (lake) swimming and health and well-being for adults living in Scotland. . . . Semi-structured interviews were conducted. . . . The findings suggest loch swimming has…

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, “It may be a sunset, a stirring orchestral number or a striking painting — whatever gives you goosebumps or makes you shed a tear. Experts believe that consistently seeking out these awe-inspiring experiences could lead to a significantly happier and healthier life. . . . Research shows that awe and wonder improve positive social behavior by helping people feel as though they are a part of something bigger than themselves. . . . awe was among the positive emotions associated with less inflammation in the body, a major trigger for chronic disease. Awe has also been shown to calm our sympathetic nervous system, which activates when we feel stressed, increasing our heart rate and blood pressure. . . . people who experience wonder tend to find a greater sense of wellbeing and purpose in their lives. . . .  It is also associated with more creativity and curiosity.”  Much of Rothenberg’s commentary is linked to the work of Dacher Keltner of the University of California Berkeley….

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 think of someone who always drinks at the same bar and feels like going in for a beer whenever they’re walking past it,” Longo [Beatriz Longo, professor of neurophysiology, UNIFESP’s Medical School] said.” “Environmental Context Strongly Influences Drug Dependence, Study Shows.” 2023.  Press release, Agencia FAPESP. https://ods.fapesp.br/environmental-context-strongly-influences-drug-de…

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 was perceived to be higher, for example. Liat Ayalon. 2023. “Perceived Neighborhood Characteristics and Wellbeing: Exploring Mediational Pathways.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 88, 102020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102020 The Irish Times reports on a study completed by Brouwer and van Rossum who found that “living in a safer neighborhood can have a greater impact on weight loss than how close your home is to a gym of grocery store.  Factors such as inadequate street lighting, groups of loitering children, and heavy traffic all have an association with difficulties losing weight. . . . In the long term [18 months], safety was associated with an average decrease of 3.2 percent in weight and an average reduction of 2.6 percent in waist circumference.” “Want to Lose More Weight? Move to a Safer Neighborhood, Study Says.”  2023.  The Irish Times,https://www.theirishtimesnewstoday.com/want-to-lose-more-weight-move-to-a-safer-neighborhood-study-says/

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 physical layout; sensing nature; experiencing local identity; and engaging in the decision-making process. The five key drivers guided the development of ten spatial and policy recommendations for public and private developers, architects, and communities to help them design happier homes and neighbourhoods. . . . The ten recommendations include: creating spaces for privacy; create semi-private spaces to serve as a link between the private and the public; create possibilities to belong to smaller and larger communities at the same time; bring nature indoors; making green spaces more accessible; maintaining adaptability; creating a shared identity through history, culture or lifestyle; using noise to promote cohesion rather than conflict; making urban facilities easily accessible; and balancing accessibility and safety.” Gorana Shepherd, Adam Selvey, Ofri Earon, and Meik Wiking.  2022. “Happy Home: Learnings from the Row House Typology,” Healthy City Design 2022 Conference, https://www.salus.global/article-show/happy-home-learnings-from-the-row…

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, how it leads us to feel and yes, even to behave. Rigorous studies have determined, for example, that: The positive implications of seeing and hearing water result when the water experience aligns with the sort of water our ancient ancestors would have experienced in a lovely meadow on a good-weather day.That means water that’s moving, quietly and gently—as a burbling brook does.  Water that brings to mind bad weather degrades our mood and experience. Researchers have shared that we may prefer shiny surfaces today to matte ones because in out prehistory potable water and water sources seen from a distance, for example, were likely to have shiny, reflective surfaces. Including water inside buildings and outside them, so that it can be experienced in-house or via views or open-air sojourns, can improve our mood as well as our mental performance, all while revitalizing our brains after they become exhausted by too much focused thinking and helping us feel less stressed.Water that can be seen and/or heard is…

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 gets combined in our heads, encouraging us to think and behave in particular ways. Each of us has a dominant sense, one that’s just a little more sensitive than any of the others, one that’s the more powerful driver of our brain’s response to the world around us, one that has a particularly strong effect on our mood, our mental and physical wellbeing, our cognitive performance. For most of us our dominant sense is vision.  The attention to what we see is also driven by the ways we most commonly communicate about design, via images, still or moving, sometimes with an accompanying verbal commentary, sometimes not.  Even though what we see in a space is generally the hottest topic of discussion, the information that we pull in through our other sensory channels can’t be ignored, by our brains when it’s trying to figure out what to do or to think and, more generally, by whomever is involved in designing somewhere or something. We have different objectives,…

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!  Search “nature soundtracks” on your Internet browser of choice and you’ll find options that will please your ears and brain as well as your wallet. Why is working in nature sounds worth the effort? They speed our recovery after we’re stressed and help us feel generally less tense and/or anxious. Our mental and physical wellbeing get a boost in the right direction. Hearing natural sounds revitalizes our brains after we’ve run down our stocks of mental energy doing something that’s brain energy intense such as focused thinking, such as knowledge-type work. Listening to nature sounds is good for our cognitive performance (and our creativity) in general. Nature sounds are also particularly good at helping block the sounds of people talking nearby. Nature sounds should be played quietly, at barely perceptible volumes.  The best sorts of natural sounds to add to a place are of gently moving water (think: burbling brook), peacefully singing birds, and quietly rustling leaves and grasses.  No screechy parrots!  No hurricane force winds…

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 you’ve seen don’t indicate that something is not working correctly inside your own head—sometimes our perceptions of situations are distorted: Sensory experiences can have a halo effect, making simultaneous other experiences seem a little better than they otherwise would. So, if you’re hearing music you enjoy, the space where you are listening will smell better to you.  If you’re asked for your opinion of a space, you’ll rate it at the level of the parameter of the space you are least pleased with—if the heating, and lighting, and soundscape in your office are all great, if the air quality seems not up to snuff, you’ll evaluate that space as not very good, regardless of the heating, lighting, and soundscape. If we believe that a condition is averse, for whatever reason, that perception will drive outcomes. If we think a space is very warm, for example, that thought will decrease our performance, we will feel stressed, whether it is actually, by any sort of objective temperature measurement,…

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 stress but also increased motivation to learn and practice. . . . Time use and quality of cavity preparation were enhanced. This study lends support to the use of slow background music in preclinical cariology training, as it appeared to have helpful effects on dental skills education and practice.” Slow background music is described “as classical, jazz, easy listening, or slow pop music. Songs with a tempo of around 60 beats per minute were defined as slow (relaxing) music. . . .  A medium-level volume of 45–50 dB was chosen based on the recommendations of the Association of the Federal Office for Economic Affairs, Labor and Foreign Trade SECO, which state that duties requiring cognitive concentration should be performed with a noise exposure level under 50 dB.” Szabolcs Felszeghy, Miko Liukkonen, Carlos Tornero, Olli Auvinen, Kallie Hamalainen, Aisha Banafa, and Pirjo Kurki. “Influence of Background Music on Stress Reduction and Impact on Performance During Students’ Simulation Exercises.”  Journal of Dental Education, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/jdd.13235

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 it really is, our sense of touch improves. . . . When the participants signaled that they understood the opposite hypnotic suggestion that their index finger was five times smaller than it actually was, their sense of touch deteriorated accordingly. The study shows that our tactile perception is affected and can be altered by our mental processes. . . . ‘Our study provides another building block supporting the idea that such top-down influences of beliefs on perception do indeed exist,’ stresses Hubert Dinse. ‘The beliefs we hold do indeed change how we experience the world.’” “Our Thoughts Alter Our Tactile Perception.” 2023. Press release, Ruhr Universitat Bochum, https://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2023-05-11-neuroscience-our-…

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 effect as it relates to other people.”  Laerke Mygind, Gillian Clark, Felicity Bigelow, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Luke Knibbs, Suzanne Mavoa, Trine Flensborg-Madsen, Peter Bentzen, Jarrad Lum, and Peter Enticott.  2023. “Green Enrichment for Better Mind Readers?  Residential Nature and Social Brain Function in Childhood.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 88, 102029, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102029

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 at the levels they like. To end the debate (or at least move it on to a new topic):  Our wellbeing is best, our bodies and our brains do their best work when the thermometer is set at around 70 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity levels are moderate—it’s hard to be more precise because air currents through a space, whether windows can be opened or not, and similar factors affect what’s best. An easy fix if a place seems too warm or too cold: change, over time as resources allow, the dominant colors in a space.  When cool ones predominate a space will seem a little cooler than it actually is and when they’re warmer it will seem slightly warmer than it objectively measures—these effects can be enough to make people happy who previously had lots of negative things to say about the temperature.  When we’re experiencing cool light we’re also cooler than when we’re in a space lit with warm light. Making a space…

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 the latest trends. They are wrong. The most important thing that you can do, design- and otherwise, is to be true to yourself.  Don’t do something because other people are doing it—whatever is “trending” might be right for them and not for you or right for nobody at all. Things like our personality and our culture influence the sorts of design that makes us most comfortable, that actually improve our lives, and a trend may align with our best ways of living or not. For instance, introverted people would prefer to live in spaces that are more effectively divided up into different areas for particular activities and extraverts feel better about living (and working) open plan.  Since extraverts love things like being on television home redesign programs which introverts often clamor to escape, living without walls became a thing, a trend.  All the while, introverts who feel better about living their own life and not just “going along,” have fueled a mini-industry of putting in walls…

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 soft surfaces, such as upholstery, a few wall hangings, a carpet or two, etc., when you can. Listen to music whenever you’d like.Your heart starts to beat in time to whatever you are listening to so when there are fewer beats per minute you’re relaxed while more beats per minute than your resting heart rate rev you up.  If you are soundscaping an area for several users with diverse tastes in music, the best overall option is instrumental classical music. Music can be great for blocking out distracting nearby noise, but your brain will work best without the music if you can avoid the distractions, particularly if you’re listening to music with words. A better way to block out nearby sound, that’s also relaxing and mentally refreshing, is listening to nature sounds, really the soundtrack of a meadow on a lovely Spring day. That means burbling brooks, gently rusting leaves and grasses, peacefully singing songbirds—no torrential rains, hurricane force winds or screaming parrots, for instance.  Nature…

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 spoken in an area and will, if we are familiar with the culture linked to the language in use, act in accordance with that culture when we are in a space.  So, a person who is bi-lingual in French and Chinese will maintain personal space distances appropriate in France when they hear French but will switch to “Chinese distances” when they people are speaking Chinese. Different languages use different sorts of systems to discuss the world and those systems determine what aspects of the environment that people note and their experiences and expectations in various situations.  The first language that people speak seems to have this effect through the rest of our lives.  Knowing more about the first languages spoken by people you share a space with, work with, etc., can help you understand how they are affected by various settings. Different cultures speak about colours in different ways, for example.  In Russian, there are entirely separate words for light and dark blue, for instance (unlike…

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 for ≥150 min per week were more likely to report better mental wellbeing . . . and life satisfaction. . . . these effects were stronger for participants aged 64 years and older. These findings contribute to a burgeoning body of research that indicates gardening may be beneficial for mental health and life satisfaction, that gardening for at least 2.5 hrs per week is linked with better mental health outcomes, and that gardening may be particularly beneficial for older adults.” Selma Fjaestad, Jessica Mackelprang, Takemi Sugiyama, Manoj Chandrabose, Neville Owen, Gavin Turrell, and Jonathan Kingsley.  2023. “Association of Time Spent Gardening with Mental Wellbeing and Life Satisfaction in Mi-to-Late Adulthood.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 87, 101993, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101993

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 to an object reduces the psychological distance to the object’s meaning and enhances the benefits that consumers associate with the object. . . . material objects may . . . act as triggers for future consumption episodes. For example, wearing a festival entrance bracelet may not only allow consumers to connect to a self-defining meaning, but also fuel the desire to re-experience that meaning by visiting the festival again. . . .  experiences such as vacations or music festivals may constitute important self-relevant meanings, they are also ephemeral. Material objects that can be held or carried (e.g., souvenirs, shirts, and bracelets) allow consumers to hold onto these meanings and, in a figurative sense, carry them along with them.” Philipp Scharfenberger, Daniel Wentzel, Luk Warlop, and Verena Riegler.  2023. “The Proximal Self:  Why Material Objects Are Particularly Relevant for Consumers’ Self-Definition.”  Psychology and Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21804

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 index], land-cover greenness, or proximity to a park. Compared to other types of green space, tree coverage showed stronger protective effects. . . . Street view-based green space and tree coverage were associated with a decreased risk of PPD. The observed association was primarily due to increased tree coverage, rather than low-lying vegetation or grass.” Yi Sun, John Molitor, Tarik Benmarhnia, Chantal Avila, Vicki Chiu, Jeff Slezak, David Sacks, JiupChiuan Chen, Darios Getahun, and Jun Wu. “Association Between Urban Green Space and Postpartum Depression, and the Role of Physical Activity:  A Retrospective Cohort Study in Southern California.”  The Lancet Regional Health-Americas, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2023.100462

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 survive, takes more effort than living and working “regular size.” Television shows and magazine spreads make living in a small home or working in a tiny workplace seem like time spent in a fairy wonderland, like being in an expertly crafted puzzle box where everything fits together in such clever ways, so exquisitely, that its builders can’t possibly have been humans. Tiny home and workplaces are, however, to the best of my knowledge, designed and built by actual Homo sapiens.  They are rarely the perfect little nirvanas that in the ideal world they would indeed be.

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 live in tiny homes or work in small spaces include: The affordable alternatives are awful. Running life or work from a small space is often cheaper than other options available (i.e., paying for more square feet).  It can be inexpensive to share, but sharing requires identification of a compatible other, and sometimes those are quite scarce indeed—for any number of reasons, because of issues you have with them or (gulp) they have with you.  And when you live on your own you have much more control over how you do actually live. You want to be green. Living or working small can potentially be an Earth friendly use of resources. You like a challenge. You are the sort of person who revels in finding a way pack a raw egg in a cardboard box so that it can be dropped out of a second story window without breaking.  The idea of figuring out how to pack all of the things we seem to need for modern…

Darda and colleagues share that they “we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. . . . no evidence was found for an ingroup bias . . . when American abstract artworks were assigned with fictional American, Indian, Chinese, or Turkish artist names. Aesthetic ratings for artworks were similar across Indian and American participants, irrespective of the cultural label they were assigned. . . . An ingroup preference for Indian and American/European representational artworks was found in Experiment 3—participants preferred artworks depicting content from their own culture compared to another. Effects across all experiments persisted when controlling for participants’ age, education, art experience, and openness to experience. The modulation of art perception and appreciation by contextual information may be flexible and more influenced by cultural content depicted in artworks than simple cultural framing.” Kohinoor Darda, Alexander Christensen, and Anjan Chatterjee.  “Does the Frame of an Artwork Matter? Cultural Framing and Aesthetic Judgments for Abstract and Representational Art.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000569

Aleem and Grzywacz looked at our responses to aesthetics over time and report that “A handful of studies that have measured aesthetic preferences at multiple moments show that preferences may change in as little as two weeks. . . . we measured aesthetic preferences for different colored objects at six-time points, spanning a month. We found that aesthetic preferences were not stable and tended to drift stochastically [randomly] over time. Small statistically significant drifts occurred already after 20 min, and large ones happened after 2 weeks. . . . instability was greater for ‘hard’ choices between colors that were close in chromatic space as well as in their average preference rank. Males were more unstable than females, and instability tended to decrease with age. Surprisingly, no personality traits were found to correlate with how the participants’ aesthetic preferences changed over time.” Hassan Aleem and Norberto Grzywacz.  “The Temporal Instability of Aesthetic Preferences.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000543

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 search bar for Biophilic Design) Biophilic design informed gardens: Incorporate natural materials into anything built—which means that furniture is wooden, steppingstones are wood or stone, etc. Bonus points accrue when these natural materials develop a patina over time, as copper fittings on a shed or on wind chimes do, for instance.  When given the choice:  warmer finishes on that wood (for example, oak) are best psychologically. Provide spaces with prospect and refuge. That means there are at least some seats for visitors (or that viewers can imagine themselves in) that seem very safe (because nothing can approach them from the rear, our primordial brains still prevail when we might relax) that provide a view out over the nearby area.  This might be a seat in front of a bush or a tree trunk that’s on a slight rise, for instance, or a high-backed chair toward one side of a field, as another example.  A view from a tree house wins the most points for prospect and…

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 which is as great for our physical health as our mental state. You may be able to develop a garden space on your home or an area on a balcony that makes these sorts of soundscapes more likely—and if not, play a nature soundscape you find online that conforms to the criteria noted below quietly in your home. What sorts of nature sounds do the best job of keeping our minds fresh and performing well and our social skills top notch: Burbling brooks and gently moving water—no crashing rapids, no torrential downpours, just the quiet splashes of fresh water flowing peacefully. Ocean waves from calm seas are also good for our minds and bodies. Gently rustling leaves and grasses—these would be the sounds made by plants gently swaying in slight breezes not the noises of animals running towards us in forests so that they can have us for lunch. Songbirds singing serenely and quietly have wonderful effects on what goes on in our heads—the noises of…

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 to include in your house generally) are: Floral smells, in general, because they boost our mood. Any odors that improve our mood also lower our stress levels.  We are also less anxious when we smell florals, especially jasmine and hyacinth. Orange scents as they have been tied to lower tension levels. Smelling lemon is relaxing to smell, and so is the scent of mango (lucky dog if you can grow them in your garden). Lavender, since it is a relaxing scent which has also been linked to increasing trust levels. Rosemary, as it has been tied to improved memory and cognitive performance. When we smell rosemary, we are also likely to feel more alert. Peppermint because smelling it has been associated with improved memory performance, greater alertness/energy level, and feeling that you have not feeling as tired after a demanding physical task (and actually performing that activity more skilfully). Eucalyptus since smelling it makes us feel energized. Additional information on smellscaping your world is provided here.

We can build and use our homes in ways that increase our positive bonds with the people who live nearby. Sit on your front porch or steps if you have them from time to time to increase the neighbourliness of your neighbourhood.  Keep up your property, mow the lawn when it needs it, for instance, to also boost neighbourly good feelings.  We’re better neighbours when we know where our property begins and public and other people’s spaces end. If you place a few plants at the edge of your property line or to separate the public walkway/sidewalk in front of your home from the edge of your front lawn, your bonds with your neighbours will deepen and become more positive, there will be fewer incursions on your space, both people walking on your lot and also from people littering, etc.  Any subtle signals of where your property begins will do the trick:  whether they’re a change in surface material on pavement, a step up or a step down, a white picket fence, or something else entirely—your neighbours and passers-by will notice and show more respect for “your place.” Thinking of adding CCTV?  It will give you tape of any incidents…

Want people to do something particular in a space?  Sit quietly and read?  Enjoy a movie with others without interjecting comments for all to hear?  Eat using the table manners their grandmother would be proud of? Then create spaces that will remind them of acting in just the desired ways in the past. In our earliest days, when we are learning the basic rules of our societies, we learn to behave in certain ways in certain places.  We learn that in a classic academic library-type setting we need to quietly work alone and not disturb others who are also quietly working alone, for example.  We become aware that it’s rude to talk louder than the quietest whisper (and then only about the most important topics) during shows at community movie theatres.  Grandmothers can be sticklers for manners and being in a place that brings Grandma’s dining room to mind makes it less likely that we’ll put our elbows on the tables, just like sitting in a booklined interior or at a large oak-top table can make us think of a library and how we were trained to behave there. Iconic versions of libraries, movie theatres, and grandma dining rooms are…

Carbon reports that “When we attend sculptures in museums, they might fascinate us due to the mastery of the material, the inherent dynamics of body language or due to contrapposto or the sheer size of some of these statues such as Michelangelo’s David. What is less convincing, however, is the life-alikeness of the face. Actually, most visitors experience dead faces, dead eyes, and static expressions. By merely adding paraphernalia to a face (e.g., a facemask or sunglasses), such unalive sculptures gain vividness and liveliness. This striking effect is demonstrated by applying a facemask and sunglasses to a sculpture on public display in Bamberg. . . . This simple method might help connect people with sculptures or artworks, in general, to lower the barrier between the beholder and artwork and increase their interaction.” Claus-Christian Carbon. 2023. “Connecting the Beholder with the Artwork:  Thoughts on Gaining Liveliness by the Usage of Paraphernalia.”  I-Perception, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 1-5, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695231162010

New research confirms that experiencing higher levels of light at night may not be healthy for people, particularly pregnant ones.  A study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Maternal Fetal Medicinereports that “Pregnant adults who had greater light exposure three hours prior to sleep had a higher risk of developing gestational diabetes than those who had less exposure during this period. . . . Gestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that occurs during pregnancy. It can cause harm to both mother and baby. Studies show that the condition is on the rise nationwide.  Recent studies show that greater exposure to light at night may cause impaired glucose regulation in non-pregnant adults. . . . Common sources of light at night include televisions, laptops, tablets, and cell phones.” “Greater Light Exposure Prior to Sleep May Raise Risk of Gestational Diabetes.”  2023.  Press release, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/greater-light-exposure-prior-sleep-may-raise-risk-gestational-diabetes

Rahal, Wells, and Evan “examined the [relationship between] school greenspace . . . and a standard literacy enrichment program . . . over a one-year period for a large sample of ethnic minority (95%) elementary school children . . . attending predominantly low-income schools . . . throughout the state of California. . . . On average, reading interventions conducted in schools with greater greenspace were more efficacious in improving individual students’ reading outcomes over a one-year period than reading interventions conducted in schools with less greenspace. . . . [the] effect . . . can be translated into an average gain of 1 week of learning in reading per year per student for two hours of academic instruction delivered weekly in school environments with an additional 14% school green land area.” Rouzbeh Rahal, Nancy Wells, and Gary Evans.  “School Greenspace Is Associated with Enhanced Benefits of Academic Interventions on Annual Reading Improvement for Children of Color in California.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101966

Movies and television shows and books and magazine articles (every sort of media, it seems) makes city living seem oh so exciting and in many ways quite irresistible.  Country living is presented as fine, of course, if you must—it does have advantages of clean air and green space galore—but it just lacks the panache of life in the city. (No one seems too psych’ed about life in the suburbs except, or course, those of us who do so quite happily). But what, really, are the benefits of spending time in the city? Being in many cities around the world means you’re likely to spend more time walking around than you probably will living somewhere where it’s so easy to pop out into the car whenever there’s anything you need or want to do, and that can be good for your waistline, your heart, etc. All this walking and also, potentially, rides on public transportation, make it more likely you’re living in an environmentally responsible way, at least transportation-wise—how green your actual city life is, is dependent on lots of factors, such as how your in-city home is heated and cooled.  But, regardless of how environmentally responsible your city life is,…

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 have come to process the information that we pull from the world around us in ways linked to good lives when we’re living in the countryside.  Developing spaces in line with these “countryside” conditions is the essence of biophilic design, which we’ve talked about in this article.  We can pull from biophilic design and elsewhere to create in-city spaces where our lives are pleasant and our brains performance level is high. How can you live your best modern-human life in the city? Find a place to live as close to as big a natural space as you can, probably a park, maybe a famously large space such as Central Park or Hyde Park, or maybe a pocket park tucked between two high rises. Spending time in nature, even if that nature is somewhat limited and even if we can only be in it for a few moments each day, refreshes our brain, guiding us to excel cognitively, emotionally, and socially (nothing makes us grumpier than being…

Although there’s always the chance (day or night) to pop out of an urban residence, it’s even more important that that a home in the city aligns with your personality than that one outside the city does as you’ll likely have less outdoor nature in the city to escape to when things get tough.  We’ve talked about considering your personality, and the personalities of people you will share a space with, when you create spaces to live and work in this article. Psychologists doing the most rigorous sorts of personality research categorize people on continuums of extraverted to introverted, more or less conscientious, more or less agreeable, being more or less open to non-standard experiences and being more or less emotionally stable (these factors are, altogether known as the Big-5). To quickly assess your personality or someone else’s using the Big-5 system, use the questions here. Some of the most important concepts to consider when you are doing personality-conscious design are: Extraverts and introverts thrive, and their brains work most effectively, in different sorts of places. Extraverts don’t process incoming information from their eyes, ears, nose, skin, and taste buds as effectively as introverts do, so they function better (doing…

When you are selecting a home, in the city or elsewhere, it’s important to make up your own mind about the options available to you and not be cajoled into living here or there by the opinions of agents of various sorts who report that they have design or similar training—specifically, whether these other people like a space or not. Trusting the opinions of architects and interior designers pre-design is something that should be done with care. Architects and interior designers are excellent sources of information about future options for a space and a fact-based take on a place as you buy it—but comments made by architects and interior designers about whether they “like” it should not affect whether you decide to live there. Why so negative about rental agents, etc.? Our design expertise influences how much we like a space, whether we prefer it or not, and people who offer opinions and have more design training may select, etc., spaces that ultimately will leave those without so much training unhappy. Training influences what we find familiar, and in a general sense we prefer the familiar.  People who are more open to experience are a little less tied to familiar stuff…

Pets living in cities lead very different lives than their country cousins.  In this era, city dogs are likely to have some access to nearby green areas, but that’s not necessarily the case.  City cats seem much less likely to spend time outside in their relatively harsh environs than cats in more rural areas. Regardless of whether your pets are getting all the time in nature that they might like, to frolic about like their primordial selves (at least, when their primordial selves weren’t hungry or hunting or grazing), make sure their lives are still good: Give your pet a territory that they can feel is all theirs, a place where their bed is that’s out of the way, for instance.Pets need their own home bases as much as their humans do. Make sure pets have access to natural light all day. Provide pets with something to do. A view to outside is fun for pets—if windows are too high for them to see out of or climb to (many a tubbier dog can’t get to a window sill where a cat can spend hours), build some sort of ramp up to that window view (with furniture or maybe even…

February 10, not coincidently, probably, just before Valentine’s Day, Ronda Kaysen writes, in The New York Times, about people who live together, who love each other, who choose to sleep in separate bedrooms (“I Love You, But I don’t Want to Sleep with You,” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/realestate/couples-separate-bedrooms.html). Acknowledging that when someone is deeply annoying (for example, because they snore) some sort of fix is in order and that people do indeed need their own space, a territory that’s all their own (for their mental wellbeing) is too rarely done—but it doing so can have positive effects on mental and physical health. As Kaysen reports, “One in five couples sleep in separate bedrooms. . . . And interior designers have reconfigured homes to transform separate bedrooms into adjoining ones. . . . according to the International Housewares Association, a trade organization, 31 percent of surveyed couples who said they sleep apart reported that the arrangement had no impact on their relationship, and 21 percent said that their relationship improved because of it. . . About 46 percent of the people surveyed who said they had called the shared bed quits blamed a partner’s snoring or tossing-and-turning for the change, according to the International…

On January 31, in an article for The New York Times, Tim McKeough writes about designing spaces for children, that are, miraculously, developed keeping kids’ needs in mind (“How to Create a Playroom that Appeals to Children and Adults, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/realestate/kids-playroom-design.html). Way too often the needs of actual users don’t get much attention when environments are being created, which makes applying environmental psych in ways that can have the biggest payoffs less likely. As McKeough reports “Thanks to an awareness that design affects childrens’ development, playrooms are no longer ‘the worst room in the house.’  You may even want to hang out there.”

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 small desk. Those with a dedicated workroom were less distracted. . . . although only correlation inferences could be drawn from the current dataset, the findings do suggest that suboptimal workplace conditions, also when working from home, may lead to lower transient as well as chronic mental health states. Workplace managers should therefore consider more flexible workplace concepts and policies that allow employees to choose where to work, and, in case work is forcefully located at home, to help employees create good conditions there. Such considerations could possibly reduce employees’ experience of distractions, raise their productivity, and protect their mental health.” Lisanne Bergefurt, Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek, Celine Maris, Theo Arentze, Minou Weijs-Perree and Yvonne de Kort.  2023. “The Influence of Distractions of the Home-Work Environment on Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”  Ergonomics, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 16-33, https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2022.2053590

Gregory and colleagues report that “Savoring—an emotion-regulation strategy that involves deliberately upregulating positive affect—has many benefits, but what enhances savoring in the present moment? Drawing from life-history theory, affective and developmental science, and social-psychological frameworks, we examined the idea that perceptions of uncertainty––perceiving the world as random and unpredictable—enhance subsequent savoring. . . . we found that individuals who perceived more uncertainty showed increases in subsequent savoring in their daily lives. . . . individuals who watched a film that induced uncertainty (vs. order or a control condition) subsequently reported higher savoring intentions. Finally, in a field experiment on a busy urban street . . . we found that passersby who received fliers that induced uncertainty (vs. order) subsequently engaged in more savoring behavior by stopping to smell a bouquet of roses. . . . uncertainty . . . can cause people to savor the positives of the present.” Andrew Gregory, Jordi Quoidbach, Claudia Haase, and Paul Piff.  2023. “Be Here Now:  Perceptions of Uncertainty Enhance Savoring.”  Emotion, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 30-40, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000961

Soares and Storm report that “The photo-taking-impairment effect is observed when photographed information is less likely to be remembered than non-photographed information. Three experiments examined whether this effect persists when multiple photos are taken. Experiment 1 used a within-subjects laboratory-based design in which participants viewed images of paintings and were instructed to photograph them once, five times, or not at all. . . . and the photo-taking-impairment effect was observed when participants took multiple photos. [During] Experiment 2. . . . Participants either photographed all of the paintings they saw once, five times, or not at all. . . . The photo-taking-impairment effect was observed in both photo-taking conditions relative to the no photo baseline. Experiment 3 replicated this pattern of results even when participants who took multiple photos were instructed to take five unique photos. . . . the photo-taking-impairment effect is robust, occurring even when multiple photos are taken.” Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm.  2022. “Does Taking Multiple Photos Lead to a Photo-Taking-Impairment Effect.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 29, pp. 2211-2218, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02149-2

Wang and Chang report that their “study takes popcorn packaging as an example to explore the impact of packaging colour on consumers’ taste perception and preference evaluation. . . . Four experimental package design colours (red, blue, yellow, and white) and three popcorn tastes (sweet, salty, and tasteless) were used. . . . The results of this study indicated that . . . yellow and red packaging are suitable for a sweet product, blue is suitable for a salty product, and white is suitable for a tasteless product.” Ching-Yi Wang and Fei-Ya Chang.  2022. “The Influence of Packaging Colour on Taste Expectations and Perceptions.” COLOUR Research and Application, vol. 47, no. 6, pp. 1426-1441, https://doi.org/10.1002/col.22812

Zhang and colleagues found that “Perceived air quality was reduced significantly as indoor temperature increased. . . . Higher outdoor air supply rate is recommended when indoor temperature rises. . . . The subjective evaluations collected during intervention experiments showed that perceived odor intensity by visitors upon entering the room increased significantly, meanwhile the satisfaction and acceptability of air quality reduced considerably at the indoor temperature of 27 °C than that at 24 °C. . . . the calculated CO2 emission rate by students increased by 0.54 L/h per person for every 1 °C rise in indoor temperature. Corresponding to the control target of indoor CO2 concentration of 1,000 ppmv, the outdoor air ventilation rate required to eliminate occupant-generated pollution needs to be increased by 0.25 L/s per person.” Xiaojing Zhang, Caixia Zhao, Tianyang Zhang, Jingchao Xie, Jiaping Liu, and Nan Zhang.  2023. “Association of Indoor Temperature and Air Quality in Classrooms Based on Field and Intervention Measurements.”  Building and Environment, vol. 229, 109925, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2022.109925

Sometimes people create a whole space without considering what the ambient soundscape will be.  They may consider where to place speakers for the sound system they will install but not what user ears will experience when that sound system is off. The sort of floorplan in place, the zones you’ve established, have a lot to do with the acoustic situation. Try to group spaces that will be similarly noisy together (say, the kitchen and the family room) and separate spaces with different noise profiles (i.e., where you expect or need different noise conditions, for example, bedrooms and family room).  Transition zones, for example, hallways can act as noise buffers, to some extent, and can themselves be managed noise-wise (a corridor can be carpeted or not), Harder surfaces lead to echoing and echoes make us feel tense. Carpets and hanging textiles (on walls or at windows) make echoes less likely.  Uncurtained windows, ones without blinds, are large hard surfaces and they send sound ricocheting around.  Sure, curtains and blinds can block views, but you may be particularly happy to have them at night when those views disappear and you’re still in your home. To some extent, green leafy plants can prevent…

Spaces where we can relax as we explore our own minds and work toward goals that are important to us are vital for our mental health. In “In Praise of Unfinished Basements,” Brady Brickner-Wood (2022, The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/magazine/creativity-basement.html) explores the psychological benefits of being able to spend time in storeroom-like unfinished basements.  Speaking of spending time in their parents’ basement on trips home they share that “I can still spend hours there alone, reading and writing until my eyes shut. Even now, entering the basement makes me feel like I am descending into parts of my mind that I didn’t know existed.” The writer has many positive things to say about the basement as a “mutable, adaptable” space, “a place where life was more than what it seemed and our [their friend group’s] messy thoughts wound their way toward purpose. . . . As a writer, I try to recreate this alchemy in my work spaces. . . . I still make use of what the basement taught me: I imagine myself into an elsewhere, where reality softens and my creative potential helps me explore what remains unknown.”

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 where you spend your time can, however, elevate your mental health and wellbeing when you know how to use it to your advantage, when you put design-related science to work. In this article we’ll cover things you can do to give your own mental health, and the mental health of those you share space with, a smoother path to higher ground: Make sure you and other users have options. Create a place where you and all the other people in a space can make some choices, reasonable, meaningful ones, about how to spend your time.  Will you work at your designated workspace or on the patio with the view of the pond?  With the windows open or closed?  With the lights on full strength or reduced to a golden twinkle?  While sitting on a sofa or in an Aeron chair?  We need to be able to make choices—the reward centres in our mind light up even when we just consider making some sort of selection.  We…

You may be thinking that the only way your design decisions will influence your physical health is if that oh so pretty throw you buy to make your winter sofa cozy or that incredible rug you find at the Moroccan street fair off gasses something deadly into your home. If that’s what you’ve been thinking, you would be wrong. Clearly, filling your home with deadly chemicals has an undesirable effect on your physical health, but in this era, as consumer protection laws get more and more powerful, at least in the West, few options available to you will fill your home with meaningfully unhealthy vapors. Today, the most significant ways that design is likely to influence your health is by raising or lowering your stress levels.  When we experience higher stress levels all sorts of undesirable things start to happen to our mood as well as our bodies’ operating systems—our immune system doesn’t fight off diseases as well, our heart works harder, and our veins and arteries get pounded extra forcefully by blood moving from our hearts to elsewhere, just for starters.  Being stressed can be especially hard on our digestive system, causing all sorts of undesirable and persistent conditions….

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 effect on human wellbeing and performance. Natural light boosts our mood, people in homes with more of it fared better psychologically. Access to green space, in nearby, comfortably walkable parks, or, even better, in private spaces in gardens/back yards or on balconies/terraces, has a very powerful and positive effect on human wellbeing, how comfortable we feel generally. Green plants indoors can elevate mood and cognitive performance all while helping the people looking at them feel fresher mentally. Spaces tailored to function make it more likely that desired situations ensue—for example, people with dedicated home office spaces had better at home work experiences than those who didn’t. Good design still Sends the right messages silently, without words, to users and onlookers, which is covered in this Space Doctors article  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/06/01/hearing-the-right-silent-messages/ Builds in ways to refresh mentally (discussed in this article) https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/01/28/keep-your-mind-and-body-refreshed/ Develops spaces biophilicly, as detailed here  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/this-months-feature/2022-april-biophilic-design/ Provides users with comfortable levels of control over the environments they’re in, reviewed in detail here  https://thespacedoctors.com/index.php/2022/06/01/being-in-control/

When people visit our homes we want it to smell “good”—the amount of air freshener sold during the holidays, particularly of holiday scents like cinnamon-y ones, indicates that we may actually be desperate to make sure our homes have appealing smells over the holidays. The scents you add during the holidays can make your home a better place to live all year round. That cinnamon smell, for example, can be particularly handy to have around if creative thinking is important to you (and for most of us, it is, whether we realize it or not—have you tried to reason with a teenager recently, for instance). Rigorous research has indicated that even the faintest whiffs of a cinnamon-vanilla smell boost our creativity—and in the Western world, no smell is probably more linked to holiday good times with family and friends. When you’re scenting, at the end of the year or any time, subtlety is your friend.  Too much and people feel manipulated (too too much can also make any of us feel sickened). When you’re fine-tuning how much scent there is in a room, start by adding the littlest bit—the effects noted here ensue when people don’t consciously perceive a smell…

The end of the year is the time for lots of idealized thinking about positive conversations—maybe memories of previous ones around a holiday table, planned ones with family and friends in front of a fire, or never to happen ones during which acrimoniously divorced parents reconcile. Pleasant in-person conversations, the sort where everyone participates and says positive things to each other, are more likely when: Everyone can maintain the personal spaces from others they desire in particular situations—so chairs can be shifted slightly or sofas are long enough (and plentiful enough) so people have a real choice about how close to others they sit. Just as we are stressed by being too close to others, we get stressed when we are further from whomever we are talking to than we’d like, another reason that flexible distance seating options are a good idea. To get everyone involved, the ability to make ready eye contact is important—so your elementary school teacher was right about forming classroom chairs into a circle.A round table can work well also, but they can be hard to fit in many rooms.  A rectangular table where the chairs from the head and foot of the table are moved…

Even those of us who are not particularly religious are likely to have spiritual thoughts in conjunction with our end of year holidays.   How can you boost the “spirituality” of your home? Make the intended space a mentally refreshing place to be. Bring in green leafy potted plants and images of nature, either in photos or paintings, for example.  If there is a view of nature outdoors, open the drapes, which during daylight hours will also being sunlight into the space. Design biophilically, as discussed in this article.  The natural light and plants mentioned earlier helps with this and do does the use of natural materials, for instance, as will patterns heavy on curves used in flooring and elsewhere.  So does a small indoor water feature with slowly, gently moving water. Familiar design elements are likely the best here, not untraditional or novel ones. The space features relaxing sights, and sounds, and textures, as discussed in this article, for instance, particularly curving lines in two- and three-dimensions. Vertical, tall shapes are better additions to these spaces than horizontal ones as are curvilinear as opposed to rectilinear shapes/forms in general. Symmetry also boosts feelings of sacredness as does the impression of…

Looking for New Year’s resolutions to ring in 2023?  Yes?  Then resolve in the year ahead to: Cut the clutter in your home, as discussed in this article. Add opportunities to mentally refresh, as reviewed here. (do also search top right in our brilliant search engine!) Get into biophilic design, for example, bring in some green leafy plants, let in more natural light, and as you refresh your home, add more items made of natural materials, as discussed in this article. (and search Biophilic Design in our search bar) Make your house smell good, that is, to support whatever you’ve got planned, as we’ve talked about here or here Take a spin through your house, putting yourself in the shoes of a visitor who doesn’t know you very well, what messages would they take away about who you are as a person, what you value, etc.? Your house is always sending out silent signals to others, make sure they’re the ones you want visitors to “hear,” as covered in articles on this page Think about how you’ll look after yourself with some of our tips to create wellbeing and yoga areas What about what you eat? Have a look at some…

Interested in opera and in neuroscience?  You’ll be fascinated by this article merging the two:  Frank Rose’s “Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera” (The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/artificial-intelligence-opera.html). A taste: “’We’ve started to understand that cognition — that is, the working of the mind — exists far outside our head,’ [Alex Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland], said. “We used to imagine that the brain is a processor and that cognition happened there. But actually, we think our minds extend throughout our bodies and beyond our bodies into the world.” With music, he continued, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms, and through the rhythms onto other minds, and then onto yet more. As for the spaces where that happens, Khalil said, ‘You can start to think of them as healing places.’”

Winet and O’Brien report that “In eight experiments with nearly 6,000 total participants, [they]explored whether people tend to prefer novel, exciting experiences, such as trying a new restaurant, or familiar ones, such as returning to an old favourite—and whether those preferences shift with the amount of time people believe that they have left to enjoy similar experiences. . . . the researchers [determined] perceived endings seemed to push participants toward familiar things. They found evidence that it was not simply because the familiar experiences were a safe bet that participants knew they would enjoy, but also because they were more likely to find those familiar things personally meaningful. . . . a café slated to close for renovations might put more of its favourite dishes on the menu rather than try new items for sale.” “When Endings Approach, People Choose the Familiar Over the Novel.”  2022. Press release, American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2022/10/endings-approach-choose…

Research by Fauville and colleagues in the virtual world is probably relevant in real life also:  “the impact of three nonverbal cues displayed through video conference screenshots (i.e., gaze direction, distance between the face and the camera, camera angle) on impression formation. . . . Findings showed significant effects of gaze and camera angle on impression formation, with gaze [at the] camera positively associated with likeability, social presence and interpersonal attraction, and with high camera angles increased interpersonal attraction and decreased threat perceptions compared to low angles. . . . faces closer to the camera and maintaining direct gaze were rated as more socially present and threatening than the other three conditions. . . . High-camera angle refers to a shot where the camera is placed higher than the subject and thus looks down on them. Low-camera angle refers to a shot where the camera is positioned lower than the subject and thus looks up on the subject.” Geraldie Fauville, Anna Queiroz, Mufan Luo, Jeffrey Hancock, and Jeremy Bailenson.  2022. “Impression Formation From Conference Screenshots: The Role of Gaze, Camera Distance, and Angle.”  Technology, Mind, and Behavior, vol. 3, no. 1, DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000055

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 posture was found to improve executive function (response inhibition) measured with reaction times (for incongruent stimuli) and ERPs [event related potentials]. . .  Standing might improve executive function compared to sitting among young adults in a simulated lecture environment.” Mayur Bhat, Keshab Dehury, Baskaran Chandrasekaran, Hari Palanisamy, and Ashokan Arumugam.  2022. “Does Standing Alter Reaction Times and Event Related Potentials Compared to Sitting in Young Adults?  A Counterbalanced, Crossover Trial.”  Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 663-686, https://doi.org/10.1080/1463922X.2022.2033877

Sun and colleagues had “pregnant women between 8 and 14 weeks’ gestational age . . . view one of three, 5-min, VR [virtual reality] videos of an urban scene with different green space levels (i.e., non-green, moderate, and high) after a laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test. . . .  We found that visual exposure to a green space environment in VR was associated with both physiological and affective [mood] stress reduction among pregnant women, including lower systolic blood pressure . . . reduced salivary alpha-amylase concentration . . .  improved overall positive affect . . . and decreased negative affect of anxiety . . . compared to non-green space environment. Exposure to high green space environment in park-like setting had the strongest impacts on stress recovery.” Yi Sun, Fu Li, Tao He, Yaohan Meng, Jie Yin, Ilona Yim, Liyan Xu, and Jun Wu.  2023. “Physiological and Affective Responses to Green Space Virtual Reality Among Pregnant Women.” Environmental Research, vol. 216, 114499, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114499

Also, recently, another study has been published laying out how good for our mental state it is to be around pets (dogs in the case of the newest study)—a research project like this draws attention like this every few years, it seems. The latest findings are profiled at: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/health/petting-dogs-brain-study-wellness-scn(Sandee LaMotte, 2022, “What Petting a Dog Can Do For Your Brain”).  An excerpt: “You get to sit next to both of these fluffy friends and pet their fur. Guess which one will make your brain light up? If you guessed the real dog, you’re right. Stuffed animals, as cute and cuddly as they may be, just don’t supercharge our frontal cortex, the part of the brain overseeing how we think and feel. . . . ‘We chose to investigate the frontal cortex because this brain area is involved in several executive functions, such as attention, working memory, and problem-solving. But it is also involved in social and emotional processes,’ said study lead author Rahel Marti, a doctoral student in the division of clinical psychology and animal-assisted interventions at the University of Basel in Switzerland, in an email. Why is this finding important? It provides additional evidence that live human-animal therapy interactions…

Designing workplaces where dogs thrive (just like their owners and where both dogs and owners might potentially do their best work) is a topic that is getting or needs to get more attention in human resources departments, etc., as more and more organizations establish dog-friendly office policies to entice people to return to onsite work.  (For more details, see this article, for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62912862). The suggestions that follow are just as applicable to workplaces as they are to homes. Dogs and cats, like human toddlers (and sometimes humans who are not toddlers at all) enjoy exploring the world around them, including the contents of cabinets and drawers.  Cabinet doors and drawers that dogs and cats can open can lead to many a call or a frantic trip to a veterinary poison control centre.  Doggy and kitty paws may lack thumbs but they’re a lot more capable than you might realize—don’t learn just how nimble those little toes can be when you find a pet sickened by eating laundry soap or worse, dog- and cat-proof just as you would baby-proof your home. Similarly, both dogs and cats and toddlers are apt to chew on what they find nearby, so plants, etc.,…

How do you design spaces that will make your moggy and pooch happy? environments (except for the much-needed retreats mentioned earlier), maybe more so than some of their human companions. Try to build in animal height sightlines through a space whenever is reasonable and comfortable for pet-affiliated humans. Views inside seem to give pets a feeling of control, they have ideas of actions they can take, as needed, to evade undesirable situations (such as requests to go outside on rainy, cold days)—pets, like their humans, like to have a comfortable feeling of control over their environment.  Options when outside, in a yard, for instance, mean dogs and cats can make choices about sun or shade, etc., also as they see fit.  Views outside from inside give dogs and cats a feeling of control over their territories outside their homes (even if they’re not outside they can see what is happening outside, and that’s a plus).  Looking at what is happening outdoors also makes it less boring to be in the house, waiting for humans to get off work and take the pet for a walk or give them a cuddle.  If you have a pet that can hop, they might…

Humans have very special relationships with shiny, reflective surfaces.  Some scientists think that this is because our sensory systems developed to find them particularly pleasant as the surfaces of bodies of clean fresh water often mirror the skies around them and surrounding vegetation. All else being, the same, we prefer glossy surfaces to matte ones. Shiny floors may be perceived to be slippery by people looking at them, however, and shiny window frames and similar surfaces can generate lots of glare. Mirrors on walls make a space seem larger and shiny finishes on objects will seem heavier than those with a matte surface. Mirrors on walls can help “move” daylight through a space, increasing the size of daylit interior spaces and the available daylight’s positive effects on our mood, cognitive performance, and ability to get along with others, for example. If we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror and the surface behind us is more complex visually, we’ll perceive ourselves as smaller, slimmer which can be good for our self-esteem. The same goes for anything we see against a more complex background, whether that’s a sofa or a vase. When all else is the same, shiny options will be perceived…

Most of us, happily, have well-functioning eyes that make it easy for us to look around us, but what are the best sightlines for us through a space? Having a sightline view of at least 50 feet through a window into the space outside or at least 15 feet into the distance as we work is best for our mental performance and our eye comfort. The very best views for us across a space allow us to see outside.We reap all sorts of benefits from being to see outside.  Being able to see outside even helps us better keep track of where we are inside and find our way through a space, for example.  Being able to see outside also makes an inside space seem larger and more comfortable, it helps boost our mood, lower our stress levels, and refresh us mentally, for starters, which means our brains are better at problem-solving, thinking creatively, and getting along with others, for example.  When we’re looking outside it’s great if we can see some fresh, gently moving water (even a small-ish water feature in an otherwise barren courtyard can help), whether that water is part of a naturally occurring feature, like a…

Organizing a fundraiser?  You’ll be interested in research conducted by Pfeiffer, Sundar, and Cao.  Their work indicates links between language used and the effectiveness of charitable appeals and it is possible that their findings can be extended to design’s effects on appeals experienced.  The Pfeiffer lead team report that “Charitable appeals generally address relatively serious topics. Since formal language style is more context congruent in communicating this seriousness, it should be more effective in expressing the emotional arousal or the effort of the communicator, which we expected to result in greater charitable support. . . . We find that formal language style (vs. colloquial) results in greater charitable support.” Bruce Pfeiffer, Aparna Sundar, and Edita Cao.  “The Influence of Language Style (Formal Vs. Colloquial) on the Effectiveness of Charitable Appeals.”  Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21729

Vitale and colleagues report that via “data from an 18-country sample (N = 15,743) the current work extended previous research by examining: a) blue spaces (coasts, rivers, lakes, etc.) in particular; b) associations between adults’ recalled childhood exposure to blue spaces, frequency of recent visits to green and blues spaces, and adult subjective well-being; c) the role of childhood exposure to blue spaces on intrinsic motivations to spend time in nature; and d) the consistency of these relationships across different countries. . . . Building familiarity with and confidence in and around blue spaces in childhood may stimulate a joy of, and greater propensity to spend recreational time in, nature in adulthood, with positive consequences for adult subjective well-being. . . . policies and initiatives encouraging greater contact with blue spaces during childhood may support better mental health in later life by enhancing intrinsic motivations and consequently the frequency of nature-based recreational activities in adulthood.” Valeria Vitale, Leanne Martin, Mathew White, and 16 others.  “Mechanisms Underlying Childhood Exposure to Blue Spaces and Adult Subjective Well-Being:  An 18-Country Analysis.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101876

A research team based at the University of Michigan is making available, without charge, an easy-to-use tool that can be used to determine how well a particular area supports the cognitive health of aging brains.  The press release for this achievement notes: “A new tool, an interactive map developed by University of Michigan researchers, allows you to plug in your address and assess how your neighborhood could support healthy cognitive aging under a theory U-M scientist Jessica Finlay and colleagues developed, called ‘cognability.’ . . . a group at the U-M Institute for Social Research and U-M School of Public Health. . . . recently published a study in Social Science & Medicine finding that. . . . . neighborhood features such as recreation centers, civic and social organizations, fast-food and coffee shops, arts organizations, museums and highways all were significant predictors of people’s cognitive function scores. People who lived in neighborhoods with ready access to civic and social organizations displayed higher cognitive scores than those who lived in neighborhoods with no immediate access to such organizations. This is similar to about a two-year difference in people’s age.”  There is, similarly, a difference in cognitive scores (corresponding to a two-year…

Zones, whether they’re created by walls or via darker and lighter (more brightly lit) spaces drive our activities in powerful and useful ways. It is important to acknowledge, right off the bat, that we can create zones within a structure (or outside it) in a variety of ways, some of which are more architectural (for example, walls and doors and variations in ceiling heights) and others that are more based in interior design, such as lighting of different colours, edges of rugs, and furniture arrangements, for instance. We can also zone an area by the time of day.  A room can be a professional home office sometimes and a family dining area otherwise. Honesty is always the best policy and particularly when creating zones. Often zoning is coupled with magical thinking.  If you are creating a study space for your children, and placing it near the area where you will watch movies with your partner as your children study, they will not be able to learn effectively in the area you’ve set aside, the distractions from those movies will degrade their learning ability—without serious soundproofing, and soundproofing curtains just won’t do the trick.  You can’t effectively do your job, at…

The Scandinavians have been doing it for aeons – they hygge (different languages use different terms but “hygge” is the one that English speakers are most familiar with). Hygge makes a space cosy and a wonderful place to spend a long, dark evening—and there’s a lot of scientific support for how the North people have been doing it for generations, long before there was much of what we currently think of as “science” even around. According to tradition, and to science, in a place where there’s hygge, there are: Cups of warm drinks clasped. Research shows that we think more positively about other people when our hands are warm, as they are when we’ve held onto mugs of something toasty. Candlelight and fire light are big in hygge spaces.Study after study has shown that we’re more relaxed, get along better with others, and are even more creative (which can come in handy on a long winter’s night when you have lots of time to fill) when we’re in light that’s warmer and a little dimmer, just like candlelight and fire light.  Also, watching fires in general is refreshing mentally.  Candlelight and fire light also create a light zone in a…

As the days grow shorter, your opportunities to paint whatever might need painting in your home fewer.  So, the question of the moment becomes:  what colours should you select for those walls, ceilings, doors, and floors? Science tells us that: If you have positive associations to a colour, it’s a great option for you to use in a space.For example, if your grandmother’s dining room was painted the lightest of light violets and you had lots of fun with your family eating in that room when you were growing up, you should consider using the same colour in your own dining room or family room, etc. We’re most comfortable in a space where the darkest colours in it are under our feet and the lightest ones are overhead.Vertical walls should be intermediate colours that fall somewhere between the shades used on floors and ceilings. Colours that are lighter make surfaces seem a little further away than they actually are (so once you paint a ceiling a lighter colour than it was before, that ceiling seems higher) while darker ones bring walls in closer.Since few of us live in spaces with rooms that are extra large, lighter colours usually prevail for…

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 learned about seeing patterns on walls is also applicable when they’re in upholstery and also on rugs. Investigators have determined that: Colour combinations that feature different shades of the same hue (for example, several different shades of blue or several types of greens) or colours that have about the same level of saturation seem like more harmonious, pleasing combos. Apparent harmony also increases when all colours involved are lighter as opposed to darker and when colours combined vary only in lightness. As the scale of a pattern increases, fewer people are apt to like it. Smaller patterns on walls will likely increase the apparent size of a space, particularly when compared to the effects created by using larger scale patterns. Seeing curving lines relaxes us while straight ones bring thoughts of efficiency to mind.That means the patterns you use on the sofa in the family room should be filled with curls, or at least have relatively more curving elements than straight ones while any options you…

Scientists have carefully probed how furniture design influences how people think and behave: An article earlier in this issue discusses patterns for upholstery, etc., here. Wood grain is relaxing for us to view and helps us mentally refresh, so it’s a good choice for furnishings. It’s positive effects on cognitive performance make it a particularly good option for home offices. Glossy surfaces are preferred to matte ones. Curving forms, in the backs of sofas or table legs, for example, bring thoughts of comfort to mind and are more relaxing to spend time around than more rectilinear forms, which bring to mind thoughts of efficiency and encourage us to “get stuff done.”Design ramifications:  in your mud room you want people to do whatever they need to (take off and store coats and boots, for example) as quickly and effectively as possible, so square top and straight leg tables are a good choice.  In the family room where you want people to relax, tables that are round or shaped like paramecium, for instance, with gently curving legs are a better choice. People will talk with each other more freely if they can see each other’s faces, so just as your kindergarten teacher…

Patrick Jordan, in a short but incredibly important book (Designing Pleasurable Products – An Introduction to the New Human Factors, 2000, Taylor and Francis), lays out how design can make our lives better.  His findings are relevant whether you’re building a homestead or re-designing a teapot.  It can provide: Physio-pleasure “has to do with the body and with pleasures derived from the sensory organs. . . . Socio-pleasure . . . is the enjoyment derived from relationships with others.  This might mean relationships with friends and loved ones, with colleagues or with like-minded people.  However, it might also include a person’s relationship with society as a whole—issues such as status and image may play a role here.  Products can facilitate social interaction in a number of ways.  For example, a coffee-maker provides a service that can act as a focal point for a little social gatherings. . . . Other products may facilitate social interaction by being talking points in themselves. . . . Psycho-pleasure pertains to people’s cognitive and emotional reactions.  In the case of products, this might include issues relating to the cognitive demands of using the product and the emotional reactions engendered through experiencing the product. ….

The design of artists’ studios is currently getting a lot of attention.  For example, Clare Dowdy of bbc.com (“Behind the Scenes:  10 Revealing Images of Artists’ Studios,” https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220914-behind-the-scenes-10-artists-studios-through-the-centuries ) probes studios depicted in James Hall’s book In The Artist’s Studio:  A Cultural History.” Being an artist, and what artists actually need to do well, has evolved over time—and the images Dowdy shares of artists’ studios cover centuries of art history.  The studio shown that seems like it would work best for today’s artists (moderate visual complexity, nature views, and natural materials to boost creativity and mental refreshment, for example) is, not surprisingly that of Hiroshi Sugimoto in Tokyo, a photo of which from 2019 is included in Dowdy’s article. The studios presented are associated with artists who were successful in their time or movements of respected artists.  One of the things that artists seemed to need to communicate particularly vigorously, especially in prior centuries, was their status as a capable craftsman with many well-paid commissions.  For example, Velazquez prominently features a very expensive mirror in his painting of his studio. The continuing significance of signalling an important and discerning clientele makes sense—the challenges of selling a good such as art…

Stress of any sort is bad for our physical and mental health.  That’s why The Space Doctors often cover topics such as aligning environments with the task at hand and personality and culture, for example.  Also, when we’re stressed by one aspect of our environment we tend to feel more negatively about others, whether that sort of “reverse halo effect” (which is known as a “horn effect”) is deserved or not. In these pages we often talk about using colour to make a space seem a little warmer or cooler than it actually is (when we’re in a space with more cool colours we do feel significantly less hot than we do when we’re in an area featuring warmer ones).  We also talk often about the consequences of feeling hot or cold, for example, here. In “How Heat Waves Take a Toll on Mental Health” Hannah Seo (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/well/mind/heat-mental-health.html ) gets deep into how being too warm, what’s technically known in the psych biz as an “ambient stressor,” can wreck havoc with our wellbeing: “Studies have found links between rising temperatures and a range of mental health issues including mental fatigue, aggression and even higher rates of suicide. This connection is…

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 guards.  In a more familiar setting—the living room or the break room at work—might behaviour and decision-making differ? ‘Many times, when people come into the courthouse, they’re acting nonchalant,’ said Judge Richard Young. . . . ‘But once they see the courtroom, the jury chairs, the bench, and the judge wearing a black robe, they can detect that this is a serious setting and they need to act accordingly.’” Also, “it can be harder to establish rapport [in an online setting] because there are fewer nonverbal cues. . . . As a result, optimizing things such as lighting, framing, and camera angles is crucial. . . . People are seen as more trustworthy when filmed at eye level, for example, compared with when filmed from above or below.” Zara Abrams.  2022. “Can Justice Be Served Online.”  Monitor on Psychology, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 70-77.

Song and Sela reports that “compared with using a personal computer (PC), making choices using a personal smartphone leads consumers to prefer more unique options. The authors theorize that because smartphones are considerably more personal and private than PCs, using them activates intimate self-knowledge and increases private self-focus, shifting attention toward individuating personal preferences, feelings, and inner states. Consequently, making choices using a personal smartphone, compared with a PC, tends to increase the preference for unique and self-expressive options. . . . The findings have important implications for . . . many online vendors, brands, and researchers who use mobile devices to interact with their respective audiences.” Camilla Song and Aner Sela.  “EXPRESS:  Phone and Self:  How Smartphone Use Increases Preference for Uniqueness.”  Journal of Marketing Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437221120404

Sathian and Lacey determined that “The sensory systems responsible for touch, vision, and hearing have traditionally been regarded as mostly separate. Contrary to this dogma, recent work has shown that interactions between the senses are robust and abundant. Touch and vision are both commonly used to obtain information about a number of object properties, and they share perceptual and neural representations in many domains. . . . Touch and hearing both rely in part on temporal-frequency information, which leads to a number of audiotactile interactions reflecting a good deal of perceptual and neural overlap. The focus in sensory neuroscience and psychophysics is now on characterizing the multisensory interactions that lead to humans’ panoply of perceptual experiences.” K. Sathian and Simon Lacey.  “Cross-Modal Interactions of the Tactile System.”  Current Directions in Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221101877

We build relationships with places just as we do with other people and those relationships can be good or not so great.  Also, as with humans, there are advantages to positive relationships, the sorts that long soliloquies in lifestyle and travel magazines rework and discuss at impressive levels of detail. When we bond to a place: Our physical and mental wellbeing in that place are elevated, along with how well our brain does all the things we ask of it. We’re more likely to experience positive emotions (for example, to feel happy) there—and happiness is almost always a plus (warning: appearing too jovial at funerals is problematic and likely to get you into all sorts of trouble with surviving next of kin). We’re likely to be mentally refreshed after visiting it, and as the world gets more complicated and stressful, each day being able to revitalize our brains becomes more important. In places we’re bonded to, we’re apt to be a better global citizen and act in an environmentally responsible way. Not only do we behave better Earth-wise in places to which we’re bonded, we’re also more likely to keep them well maintained and in good repair. Similarly, we’ll prepare…

Humans usually like to be in places that seem familiar to them—but familiar does not mean exactly the same as spaces previously encountered, just consistent with those other places in important ways, areas where we spend time benefit often from being reminiscent of expected conditions. When people are asked to give their impressions of pictures of residential spaces the ones that are preferred are those that are familiar, which are also seen as the most beautiful. The same goes for more typical art, it’s what we prefer. We also prefer furniture and patterns, say on wall treatments or flooring, that are more familiar. Our culture influences what we find familiar.  Ways of using and designing spaces and the objects in them vary from one part of the world to another. Being preferred is a plus because when we encounter preferred conditions our mood improves, which is great for our ability to solve mental problems, to think creatively, and to get along with others, for example. Specific familiarity-related research shows that: We seem to prefer the familiar because it often seems safe. We’re more adventurous, and prefer familiar stuff slightly less when we’re in a positive mood (we’re a little more…

In 2019 the Happiness Research Institute released The GoodHome Report 2019:  What Makes a Happy Home? and their findings echo those shared above: “after surveying over 13,000 people and interviewing nearly 80 people in 10 European countries.  Expert interviews were also conducted with people with expertise in architecture, psychology, sustainable property development, neuroscience, city planning and social sciences; also, the content of social media posts that contained the hashtag #happyhome were analyzed.”  The investigators learned that “Happiness with our home is almost three times as important to our overall happiness as our income.” The important conditions for a happy home are: “Emotional conditions – Our emotional attachment with our home is based on five specific emotions: Pride, Identity, Comfort, Safety, and Control. . Material Conditions – The physical attributes, environmental conditions and legal settings of our home. These include size, sanitation facilities, air quality, tenure, etc. . . . Personal Conditions – How we use and engage with the home.  This covers socializing, privacy, home improvement, etc.” Also, “happiness with the home is closely linked to many other emotions and aspects of our lives, such as feeling at ease at home, feeling safe, feeling connected with ourselves, and feeling in control. . . . [home] is a place…

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 circumstances: For building bonds, there’s nothing better than spending time together, in the same place at the same time; so if you must Zoom, get together IRL as well when you can. The main reason for this is that we communicate on so many channels beside the words we speak, our tone of voice and our facial expressions, which can be transferred via Zoom (think how important eye contact is in any conversation, for example) that when we’re not together, we literally can’t be sure what our conversation partner is communicating. Comfortable eye contact has been directly linked to building bonds, all by itself. When we share a territory with someone that we have the potential to bond with, because we’re on the same team at work, for example, we’re apt to ultimately develop a tight bond with them, as long as no one’s an ogre—so here’s to team rooms for use by a single team and family rooms at home. It may seem like we…

It may seem that planes, trains, automobiles, buses, and other vehicles that move you from place to place (and some that you’ve only seen on a screen somewhere, such as spacecraft), are designed entirely by engineers, one of whom is deputized to pick a garish or just plain ugly print for the upholstery (probably as part of a dare from colleagues).  It turns out there are all sorts of designers involved with how modes of transport and the hubs at which they depart and arrive are designed—and these people really do have your best interests at heart. Lots of their work is focused on getting travellers into better moods, by creating positive pleasant spaces for them to spend time while moving or still.  Often they’re trying to make sure that the sorts of scents, sounds, etc., that you prefer to fill a space.  Why?  Experiencing preferred conditions make it more likely you’ll be in a good mood.  Why all this attention on moods?  When we’re in a better mood, however, we’ve gotten there, our brains work better (that means we’re better at problem-solving, decision-making, creative thinking, etc.) and we are nicer to other people—both of which can be very handy…

Plants and Biophilic Design You’re very apt to see potted plants, real or artificial, in any transit hub because research has shown that when plants are present in public spaces, people are friendlier, which can help diffuse potentially difficult situations before they begin.  For roughly the same reason you’re apt to see mirrors/reflective surfaces in hubs; when we can see ourselves, we’re more likely to follow social norms—to pick up our trash, not slug other people, etc. As a traveller, you’re not willing to pay much for this greenness, however.  Research has shown that although green spaces in transit hubs are popular, people in those spaces would prefer space enhancements such as additional seats and comfortable waiting areas. Studies specifically at airports has shown that people do want greenery where they’re waiting and shopping, and also curving ceilings and corridors, warm lighting, and lighter coloured surfaces—all of which are calming, as discussed in this article—which make sense because many people are tense when they fly, just because or as a result of delays, etc. Technology, Light and …Scents! You’ll likely see lots of CCTV cameras in any sort of station you frequent, and doing so makes people think about potentially…

Have you ever found yourself getting all agitated while waiting in a queue for tickets? Bouncing from one foot to the other while you’re waiting for the shop assistant to finish helping the people in front? Ever stood in a passport line at the airport? You’ll know how frustrating it can be sometimes. We have some tips and clues for people designing for “queues” that will help your customers, users and visitors have a better experience. Researchers have learned a lot about how to design a standing-in-line experience so you’ll probably feel less stressed when you finally reach the front of the line and your objective, whatever it is: We wait better when something engages our attention, such as a video or a game. When we’re in a good mood, we are better waiters. This article talks about how design can boost our mood. In-line experiences are better when we’re comfortable, so it’s great if areas, where people will stand in line, are air-conditioned and have benches where people can sit, even briefly. Older, younger, taller, shorter, etc., people can be comfortable in different conditions, and amenities such as benches provided during the wait need to support these differences. If…

Although more and more things around us are being automated, from hotel check-ins to whole dining experiences, that doesn’t mean that we necessarily like working with a robot or anything “smart”. Did you know we prefer to interact with technology in different ways in different sorts of spaces? We’re more willing to share information about ourselves in smart homes than we are in smart workplaces, which has implications for how “smart” any technology can actually be. Unless smart technology is carefully calibrated for space users those users will likely come up with some “system” to manipulate it to do what they need it to do. In one famous incident, it turned out that motion sensors that kept lights on were placed so that they were unlikely to be activated by space users.  The space users set up a Drinking Bird toy, that’s the plastic bird that bobs up and down, dipping its beak into a glass of water in front of one of the motion sensors, so the lights never turned off when people were working.  Since the Drinking Bird was not deactivated at the end of the workday, the lights in the area were on continuously, 7 days a…

Trupp and colleagues found there are significant benefits to looking at visual art and cultural content electronically, even very briefly: “When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. . . . Participants [in this study] . . . were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture (a Monet painting or a similarly-formatted display of Japanese culinary traditions).  With just a 1-2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. . . . improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. . . . The ‘non-art’ stimulus. . . . explored a diagram in the shape of a bento box, containing photos and facts introducing the viewer to the history and traditions of Japanese food, and included images of food and food-related activities, such as harvesting or drinking.” MacKenzie Trupp, Giacomo Bignardi, Kirren Chana, Eva Specker, and Matthew Pelowski.  2022. “Can a Brief Interaction with Online, Digital Art Improve Wellbeing?  A Comparative Study of the Impact of Online Art and Culture Presentations on Mood, State-Anxiety, Subjective Wellbeing, and Loneliness.”  Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13,…

Krpan and van Tilburg share that they “developed and empirically evaluated the Aesthetic Quality Model, which proposes that the link between [visual] complexity and beauty depends on another key visual property—randomness. According to the model, beauty judgements are determined by an interaction between these two properties, with more beautiful patterns featuring comparatively high complexity and low randomness. The model further posits that this configuration of complexity and randomness leads to higher beauty because it signals quality (i.e., creativity and skill). Study 1 confirmed that black and white binary patterns were judged as more beautiful when they combined high complexity with low randomness. Study 2 replicated these findings using an experimental method and with a more representative set of patterns, and it pointed to quality attribution as a candidate mechanism underlying the beauty judgements.” Dario Krpan and Wijnand van Tilburg. “The Aesthetic Quality Model:  Complexity and Randomness as Foundations of Visual Beauty by Signaling Quality.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000511

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 and skin temperatures in office workers. We equipped one office room with an automated controller for blinds and electric lighting, optimized for dynamic lighting (= Test room), and a second room without any automated control (= Reference room). Young healthy participants (n = 34) spent five consecutive workdays in each room. . . . Vertical illuminance in the Test room was 1177 ± 562 photopic lux . . . which was 320 lux higher than in the Reference room. . . . Melanopic equivalent daylight (D65) illuminance was 931 ± 484 melanopic lux in the Test room and 730 ± 390 melanopic lux in the Reference room. . . . The melatonin secretion onset and peripheral heat loss in the evening occurred significantly earlier [people were sleepy earlier] . . . in the Test compared to the Reference room.” Marta Benedetti, Lenka Maierova, Christian Cajochen, Jean-Louis Scartezzini, and Mirjam Munch. 2022. “Optimized Office Lighting Advances Melatonin Phase and Peripheral Heat Loss Prior Bedtime.”  Scientific Reports, vol. 12, np. 4267, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-07522-8

Almost all of us have art of some sort in our homes, but that art can range from a Picasso to a first finger painting by a grandchild.  Art can be most useful in our homes when it: Images to which you have positive associations, because you know the artist, because your grandmother gave you the painting, because they bring something you value about your culture to mind, because they were done in a style or by a person you find inspirational, etc., will elevate your wellbeing whenever you see them. When we’re cognitively exhausted, seeing art, realistic paintings or photographs of nature, can be mentally refreshing (and can bring down stress levels generally, whether we’re mentally exhausted or not). Restoration boosts our mood, our brain performance as well as how well we get along with other humans.  The best sort of art for revitalizing and de-stressing brings to mind a Northern Hemisphere meadow/woodland with an expansive view toward the horizon, gently rolling terrain, clumps of trees, a gently burbling brook, all on a fine weather day.  The trees are important because they can be safe havens.  Scenes from any of the four seasons can work.  A few signs of…

Recent research related to seeing yourself during Zoom calls may be useful in other contexts, for example, when you see yourself in a mirror as you speak.  A study published in Clinical Psychological Science indicates that “the more a person stares at themself while talking with a partner in an online chat, the more their mood degrades over the course of the conversation. . . . the findings point to a potentially problematic role of online meeting platforms in exacerbating psychological problems like anxiety and depression. . . . participants answered questions about their emotional status before and after the online conversations. . . . Participants could see themselves and their conversation partners on a split-screen monitor.  “Staring at Yourself During Virtual Chats May Worsen Your Mood, Research Finds.”  2022. Press release, University of Illinois, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/117509126

If you’re trying to create a space where someone with ADHD will feel comfortable: Make sure that workspaces, and home offices, for example, are as distraction-free as possible. That means, only work-related items on a dedicated work surface, a properly adjusted thermostat (so there’s no reason to pop up and fiddle with it), blinds adjusted to eliminate glare, etc.—all organized before a work session gets underway. Task lighting illuminating only what is being worked on can also boost concentration on the task at hand. Any other areas where it is best if a task proceeds in a straightforward way, such as a kitchen, can also benefit from this no/low distraction approach to design, carefully organized/curated spaces. Storage bins and baskets need to hide objects from view, or they become distractions. Carefully manage visual complexity, keeping it moderate to low-moderate, as discussed in this article, particularly in areas where it is likely the person with ADHD will need to focus. People with ADHD perform best cognitively in cooler coloured light. White noise, described in this article, seems to support concentration by people with ADHD. Build in opportunities to burn off energy. People with ADHD benefit from being able to fidget or…

And why shouldn’t it be (always)?  Research consistently shows that no matter where on the planet you ask, people are more likely to tell you that blue is their favourite colour than any other shade.  There are fundamental reasons for our blue preference:  in our early days as a species blue was important to us, it was the colour of the sky on a fair-weather day and a water hole seen from a distance—and fair-weather days and water were crucial to our survival.  We’re using the same sensory apparatus now as we did aeons ago, and it seems we’ve inherited from proto-humans mental pleasure in processing the colour blue. For some news on blue: Why Your Favourite Colour is Probably Blue https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220601-what-your-favourite-colour-says-about-you Cobalt Blue Is Color Rushing Our Summer https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/style/cobalt-blue.html

It’s nice to feel at home even when you aren’t-but unless your luggage is much, much larger than the suitcase I travel with, you can’t take much of your home with you when you travel. There are some things that you can do to feel at home where you are, wherever that may be: Keep the same smells. The scents we smell are processed in such a primordial part of our brain that they have a direct route to our emotional core.  No sensory experience effects our emotional state as quickly as the odours we smell.  After our discussions of smellscaping your home (for example here), you’ve likely started to add scents to parts of your home.  Bring the one you use in your bedroom with you, to a hotel room, a dormitory room, wherever you might be going.  You’ll feel at home fast.  The same goes for using the same lotions and potions on your skin, to wash, etc., when you’re at home and away, that way YOU’LL always smell the same. Manage the sounds. If you start to listen to a specific soundtrack as you relax or fall asleep, and store that track on your phone, you’ll always…

 We’re more apt to feel safer, that where we live is more “neighbourly,” and actually be more secure when: Cooler colours predominate in the space we’re in. We’re sitting or sleeping so that we can easily see anyone entering the room we’re in (ideally with the door opening in a way that shields us from the view of anyone entering as they begin to open that door). This works even better when there’s something behind us, a wall, a tall plant, a column, or something similar that would prevent any real or imagined, living or more ephemeral, evil-doer from approaching us from the rear.  In a restaurant, a seat in a booth with a view of the door is a very secure-feeling location, for instance. Windows in rooms where we might feel more vulnerable, such as bathrooms, are smaller and allow less view into the space from outdoors—skylights can work well in these spaces. Windows from homes overlook walkways. We have a front porch wide enough for at least one chair. There is a sidewalk in front of our house. It’s clear what space is ours and what is theirs—for example, a white picket fence or a shorter hedge surrounds…

When you’re asking yourself if you should make a change, you’re answering your own question.  When a space doesn’t seem comfortable anymore, it isn’t. A place can seem less comfortable for a variety of reasons, some grounded in how exactly the space is used (not enough bedrooms for all residents, no space large enough for a table for all family members to share, you have taken up painting and there’s no place to set up your easel, for instance), and others that are more conceptual (you’ve become more concerned about the environment and your home really isn’t very green, for example).  When friends, your community, move away, this can also be a good time for you to relocate and to start anew if you don’t feel you mesh with new residents. Beware, however, of making significant changes if you’re particularly stressed about something that’s relatively short-term (you’re ill but will probably recover, for example).  When we’re very tense, being in a familiar space can be a powerful feel-better balm. Still wavering about whether to make a change or not?  Think about the three core, design-related drives that each of us has—we’ve talked about them before, here, for example.  We are…

Fukuie and colleagues report that “Hearing a groove rhythm (GR), which creates the sensation of wanting to move to the music, can also create feelings of pleasure and arousal in people, and it may enhance cognitive performance, as does exercise, by stimulating the prefrontal cortex. Here, we examined the hypothesis that GR enhances executive function (EF). . . . participants underwent two conditions: 3 min of listening to GR or a white-noise metronome. . . . Our results show that GR enhanced EF . . . in participants who felt a greater groove sensation and a more feeling clear-headed after listening to GR.”   These findings are easier to apply in a solo user space than a shared one. Takemune Fukuie, Kazuya Suwabe, Satoshi Kawase, Takeshi Shimizu, Genta Ochi, Ryuta Kuwamizu, Yosuke Sakairi, and Hideaki Soya.  2022. “Groove Rhythm Stimulates Prefrontal Cortex Function in Groove Enjoyers.”  Scientific Reports, vol. 12, 7377, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11324-3

Pappas reviewed many published studies and determined that “Visually cluttered roads, confusing signage, and broad thoroughfares that practically beg drivers to stomp on the accelerator can encourage behaviors that raise risk. . . . Design choices like medians, trees, and cycle lanes can obstruct drivers’ views of the horizon and move their focus close to the front of their cars, encouraging more cautious driving.” Stephanie Pappas.  2022. “Improving Traffic Safety.”  Monitor on Psychology, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 47-55. 

Straffon and colleagues found that “Self-made objects tend to be favoured, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. On this basis, we set out to test whether the effects of self-relevance would apply to visual art, and via what mechanisms. In three studies, participants created abstract paintings that were then incorporated in a dot-probe task, pairing self-made and other-made stimuli. Our findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made (vs. other-made) artworks.” Larissa Straffon, Georugina Agnew, Chenika Desch-Bailey, Evy van Berlo, Gosia Goclowska, and Mariska Kret.  “Visual Attention Bias for Self-Made Artworks.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000451

Zeloni and Pavani share that “In Western music and in music of other cultures, minor chords, modes and intervals evoke sadness. . . . we asked expert musicians to transcribe into music scores spontaneous vocalizations of pre-verbal infants to test the hypothesis that melodic intervals that evoke sadness in music (i.e., minor 2nd) are more represented in cry compared to neutral utterances. Results showed that the unison, major 2nd, minor 2nd, major 3rd, minor 3rd, perfect 4th and perfect 5th are all represented in infant vocalizations. However, minor 2nd outnumbered all other intervals in cry vocalizations, but not in neutral babbling. These findings suggest that the association between minor intervals and sadness may develop in humans because a critically relevant social cue (infant cry) contains a statistical regularity: the association between minor 2nd and negative emotional valence.” Gabriele Zeloni and Francesco Pavani.  “Minor Second Intervals:  A Shared Signature for Infant Cries and Sadness in Music.”  i-Perception, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695221092471

Ouyang and colleagues report that “Many retailers use seemingly innocuous dividing lines to separate product alternatives on their websites or product catalogs. . . . a dividing line can influence consumers’ perceived quantity of the product alternatives displayed. . . . consumers perceive a smaller number of products displayed on a page when these products are separated by a dividing line compared to when they are not. This effect occurs because the dividing line separates the products into top versus bottom (or left vs. right) segments, such that participants’ visual attention is largely drawn to the top (or the left) where their eyes first fixate. Consequently, participants tend to estimate the total number of items based on the subset they pay attention to. In addition, the effect . . . can hold regardless of line orientation. Finally, it can have several marketing outcomes, such as higher willingness to buy and lower post-choice satisfaction.” Jun Ouyang, Yanli Jia, and Zhaoyang Guo.  “The Effects of a Dividing Line in a Product Assortment on Perceived Quantity, Willingness to Buy, and Choice Satisfaction.”  Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21669

Investigators lead by van Egmond report (in a study published in Nature and Science of Sleep) that “young adults when sleep-deprived evaluate angry faces as less trustworthy and healthy-looking. Furthermore, neutral and fearful faces appear less attractive following sleep loss. . . . The participants spent one night with no sleep at all and one night with an eight-hour sleep opportunity. [Data were collected] in the mornings following both nights.” It seems likely that whether one has slept or not probably influences other sorts of evaluations. “Acute Sleep Loss May Alter the Way We See Others.”  2022.  Press release, Uppsala Universitet, https://www.uu.se/en/press/press-release/?id=5866&typ=pm&lang=en

Huang, Wang, and Chan studied links between image sizes on packages and evaluations of the contents of those packages; their findings can probably be applicable more broadly: “larger (vs. smaller) food images on food packages can positively influence consumers’ initial product attitudes toward the food (i.e., purchase likelihood). . . . Compared with smaller food images, larger ones improve purchase likelihood. . . . this effect is only observed for vice (vs. virtue) foods.” Jingya Huang, Liangyan Wang, and Eugene Chan.  2022. “Larger=More Attractive?  Image Size on Food Packages Influences Purchase Likelihood.”  Psychology and Marketing, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1257-1266, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21644

If you are a company owner, how should your customer service look? Beeler and colleagues focus on judgments of digital assistant technologies, but what they learned can likely be extrapolated to other contexts: “ability assessments are dependent upon both the use context (i.e., automation versus augmentation; disclosure of automation) and individual characteristics (i.e., consumer mood state and consumer preference for human interaction). . . . some consumers simply prefer people over technology, regardless of the technological capabilities of the digital assistant. Managers should consider offering a variety of potential customer interactions, as opposed to forcing customers to use digital assistants, as frustration can ensue from a failed technological interaction when no other alternatives (e.g., human interactions) are available. . . . companies should consider contexts in which negative moods may be likely. For example, a consumer employing the use of a digital assistant to play music in a high-stress situation, such as rush hour traffic or when feeding a baby, may lead to more negative perceptions of the digital assistant’s ability.” Lisa Beeler, Alex Zablah, and Adam Rapp.  2022. “Ability Is In the Eye of the Beholder:  How Context and Individual Factors Shape Consumer Perceptions of Digital Assistant Ability.”  Journal…

Macaulay and teammates report that “Before and after a 20-minute outdoor experience, participants . . . completed surveys. . . . Participants were randomly allocated to one of four engagement intervention groups: mindful engagement, directed engagement, mind wandering, and an unguided control group. . . . the unguided control group had the greatest level of attention restoration. . . . . Performance on the post-test attention task demonstrated that the unguided control group had the highest level of attention restoration during the nature experience, and that the directed engagement group had the lowest level of attention restoration. . . . the unguided control group did not have to use their phone during the outdoor experience: previous research shows that engaging with technology during an outdoor break is detrimental to attention restoration.” Rose Macaulay, Katherine Johnson, Kate Lee, and Kathryn Williams.  “Comparing the Effect of Mindful and Other Engagement Interventions in Nature on Attention Restoration, Nature Connection, and Mood.”  Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101813

Whether it’s at work, at school, in a hospital, or even in a shop, we find ourselves in environments that we haven’t designed ourselves.  In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll explore why and how the design of these spaces influences how we think and behave. Workplaces Unfortunately for most of us, we haven’t inherited a fortune or won the lottery, so off to work we must go.  Until the pandemic, many of us spent our working time toiling outside our home, but the easing of the pandemic for most means that we’re now returning to work in out-of-the-home offices and it seems likely that those of us who haven’t started to spend many of our working hours at our company offices will start to do so again soon. So, what’s up with workplace design?  How do people familiar with the science that can and should inform the development of physical environments where we spend so many hours toiling away actually put all that research to work? It’s important to know that very little that you find in the offices where you go to work has found its way there by chance.  Professionals creating workplaces have been familiar with environmental psychology…

You’ve probably noticed that sometimes designers and managers give you choices at work—where to sit, whether window blinds are open or closed, the height of your desk—and there’s a research-based reason for that.  When we have some control over how we work, we work better (at least from a brain perspective) and don’t feel as tense compared to situations where we can’t change or select anything; both our performance and wellbeing are better when we have choices.  People sometimes even build in extra conference rooms and similar work areas because just knowing that that sort of space will be available to us if we need it improves our attitudes toward the work to be done.

Healing spaces have probably been researched more extensively than any other sort of place (largely because it’s so easy to quantify the results of design actions taken there; after something changes more or less medication is dispensed, people are discharged sooner or later, etc.).  Healthcare environments are also more likely to be designed in ways consistent with research findings. In a future issue we’ll more completely discuss the design of spaces where people are likely to heal best, so you can be ready for the next visit of chicken pox, etc., to your community.  Here, we’ll talk about the highlights of some of the relevant research that designers apply. Brains are brains no matter where they are, so any environmental psych research applications in other sorts of spaces are also relevant here. There’s a reason that there’s a lot of sameness in the layouts of exam rooms, hospital rooms, etc.  Healthcare professionals regularly need to quickly find stuff (oxygen, gloves, etc.) and the research shows that the only way to do that is to lay out each room in the same way.  Research has not been able to identify any more sophisticated way to arrange potentially necessary items than brute…

Even in our world’s best of times, life isn’t always the best-est and our planet’s current predicaments seem to move all of our societies’ wellbeing scores from middle of the road, neither terrible nor euphoric, clearly into “could be improved” territory.  Particles in the current swirling dust cloud of uncertainty and tension have no doubt recently settled upon your psyche, making you feel that much more frazzled. Design can help to counter the frazzles, if you use it the right way.  Design can’t stop wars or end inflation or any of a dozen other no-good things happening now, but it can make them less likely to send your stress levels to “steam coming out of your ears” levels. Some things in the world around you can change in a flash for almost no cost, others require building permits and loads of money.  We’ll talk about both sorts of modifications here—you know the resources (expertise, time, money, and more) you have at your disposal—also, since the entire world seems unlikely to turn into Disney Land any time soon, some things you may not be able to do in your current home may be criteria you want to look for in future…

A few of us actively soundscape the worlds in which we live, but way too many of us just let sound happen to us, which is an opportunity missed.  To calm yourself via your ears: Try listening to music with 50-70 beats per minute (aim for around 60, if you can), that has a deeper, more resonate sound (think cello not violin).There are multiple internet sites where you can learn how many beats per minute are in music that you might choose to listen to.  Try not to listen to music much slower than 50 bpm;  if you do, you’re getting into the range of lullabies and the outcomes then are pretty predictable. Music not for you?—and it is unlikely to be if you’re trying to concentrate. Give white noise a shot.  Even when played quietly it is likely to drown out most of the tension boosting sounds that surround you.  White noise is also available online but you can create it yourself via an old style radio that you tune to between two stations so instead of hearing one channel or another you process only a comforting staticky hum. A few people get tensed up listening to white noise…

It probably won’t surprise you at all to know that touching soft things, such like the flannels that baby pyjamas are made of, is relaxing.  If you want to banish the stress demons, make sure there’s nothing around you that is scratchy, itchy, or otherwise irritating to touch. Similarly unsurprising:  in a space where we’ll relax all our joints and muscles will be comfortable, ergonomics will prevail. Most of us are more significantly influencing emotionally by what we see than by information that we receive through any other sensory channel—in the psych biz this is known as being “visually dominant,” so we’ve saved some of the most powerful ways to keep stress at bay until now. Natural light has a sort of magical power over humans.It can improve our mood and help us feel calmer and more relaxed in a remarkably short period of time.  Keep your drapes open as far as possible during daylight hours.  Glare will add to your stress levels, however, so use shiny surfaces in daylit areas with care.  Positioning screens (laptops, TVs, etc.) perpendicular to windows can help them from becoming glare-y. Warmer, dimmer light, particularly if it comes from table top or floor lamps,…

To really relax in a space, people need to feel in control of it, that no one can intrude visually or acoustically without their permission—in other words, no one can see or hear them and they can’t see or hear anyone else clearly either.  Some private territories are permanent or at least indefinitely owned (even the surliest teenager will [probably] eventually leave home) and others are just ours for an hour or an afternoon, but whatever the case, we need to feel like we control access to really relax in the space.  A controlled space can be just part of a bigger one—it can be a high-backed chair turned to face a window that other people living in a house know to avoid when occupied, a bench in a garden under an arbour, or a home office with a sofa and a door that closes. In the space we control we need to be able to tweak the environment some.  Open or close windows, fiddle with the lights some, shift the furniture a little bit, etc. Also, we’ll only fully de-compress when the space that we’re in aligns with our values.  So, if we’re deeply committed to protecting the Earth,…

Many of us now are starting to travel again (hurray!) outside our own car—but travel is stressful—we’re packed into airplanes, trains, and buses as close as sardines (sometimes it seems closer) and don’t have much control of when we move or stop or even can go to the bathroom, for example. How can you use science to travel better (and remember, for most of us creating instantaneous transfer, Star Trek like transporters is not a real option, even if science could help with that): Scenting the air while you travel can be a good thing (three cheers for the air fresheners that hang from the rear-view mirrors in so many cars)—but may meet with resistance from those around you as you sit cheek to jowl in too close airline seats.So, what to do?  Suck on hard candies with calming smells, such as orange, lemon, mango, and vanilla. Bring what you want to eat on the flight with you and eat it—being hungry is very stressful—but be kind.Try to eat things that are fundamentally scent free and are neat to eat (nothing that sends crumbs three rows ahead and behind in a stardust like haze).  You are sharing your chariot with…

There are ways that design can make it more likely that you’ll have a constructive, mutually-beneficial conversation with someone else—whether you’re trying to negotiate world peace or help your teenager understand that they do not, perhaps, at least yet, know everything. And most of the ways that design can encourage good talks are, sadly, lacking in this space where Putin and Macron recently had a tete-a-tete. For the best discussions: Tables need to be carefully considered. Round tables where everyone present can easily see into each others’ eyes will up participation rates.  A round table that fits all of the needed parties to a conversation can often be quite large, however, putting people sitting across from it at conversation degradingly long distances from each other and often, literally, not fitting in the room where the conversation is to be held.  Seated conversations should take place when the discussants are at about the same distance while they are seated that they would be if standing up and having the same conversation, generally at least 4 feet and probably less than 7 or 8, with exact distances varying by culture. Since round tables for various reasons are often not feasible, people will…

New research confirms that walkability is good for us.  Wali and colleagues examined “high resolution data for 476 participants in the Rails and Health study on health care costs, mode specific MVPA[ moderate-to-vigorous physical activity], parcel-level built environment, and neighborhood perception surveys. . . .  A 1% increase in bike, walk, and transit-related MVPA was associated with lower health care costs by −0.28%, −0.09%, and −0.27% respectively. A one-unit increase in neighborhood walkability index correlates with a 6.48% reduction in health care costs. . . . The results suggest the potential to alter behaviors and lower health care costs through retrofitting neighborhoods.” Behram Wali, Lawrence Frank, Deborah Young, Brian Saelens, Richard Meenan, John Dickerson, Erin Keast, Jennifer Kuntz, and Stephen Fortmann.  “Pathways from Built Environment to Health Care Costs:  Linking Objectively Measured Built Environment with Physical Activity and Health Care Expenditures.”  Environment and Behavior, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165221083291

Some things to note as you begin to travel far from home again: Climate varies dramatically based on distance from the equator and leads people to want to use spaces in different ways.For example, in the far North, when there are long stretches of cold every year, people often enjoy being outside whenever the weather is at all temperate – so you may find people eating outside in Stockholm in Sweden’s summer months (and under lap blankets during spring and fall) in temperatures that would send someone from Miami inside restaurants at any time of the year. As we get closer to the North and South Poles sunlight becomes cooler and weaker, particular during each zones winter months. Also, as you get further North from the equator, less and less light finds its way into windows on the North side of buildings (compared to the South side of the building) and the reverse is true in the Southern Hemisphere as a person gets closer to the South Pole. Compromised cognitive performance has been found at higher altitudes, say 3450 meters, and there are tourist destinations at these elevations. Languages spoken influence how we think about and experience physical environments, as…

Ever wondered why some people you know always seem lost?  Coutrot and colleagues report that “how the environment in which one grew up affects later cognitive abilities remains poorly understood. Here we used a cognitive task embedded in a video game to measure non-verbal spatial navigation ability in 397,162 people from 38 countries across the world. Overall, we found that people who grew up outside cities were better at navigation [had a better sense of direction]. More specifically, people were better at navigating in environments that were topologically similar to where they grew up. Growing up in cities with a low street network entropy (for example, Chicago [less heterogeneous, more gridlike, for example]) led to better results at video game levels with a regular layout, whereas growing up outside cities or in cities with a higher street network entropy [more heterogeneous, streets not meeting at right angles frequently, for instance] (for example, Prague) led to better results at more entropic video game levels.” So, the design/form of where someone grows up influences their sense of direction/wayfinding ability for their lifetime. A.Coutrot, E. Manley, S. Goodroe, C, Gahnstrom, G. Filomena, D. Yesiltepe, R. Dalton, J. Wiener, C. Holscher, M. Hornberger, and…

Santangelo and associates report that “music is frequently played while we are engaged in other activities that rely on decision-making (e.g., driving). . . . We analyzed response times and accuracy from more than 100-thousand decisions and mapped the effects of music onto decision-process components with a mechanistic model of decision-making. We found evidence . . . . [that] decisions—across domains—were faster but less accurate with music. . . . Overall, our results suggest that background music shapes our decisions by making us less cautious.” Agustin Santangelo, Casimir Ludwig, Joaquin Navajas, Mariano Sigman, and Maria Leone.  “Background Music Changes the Policy of Human Decision-Making:  Evidence from Experimental and Drift-Diffusion Model-Based Approaches on Different Decision Tasks.”  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001189

Rossel and teammates report that “Our study investigated the influence of expectations based on prior experience and contextual information on the perceived sharpness of objects and scenes…  We manipulated the availability of relevant information to form expectations about the image’s content: one of the two images contained predictable information while the other one unpredictable. At an equal level of blur, predictable objects and scenes were perceived as sharper than unpredictable ones. . . . Expectations about the visual environment help us understand it more easily, but also makes us perceive it better.” Pauline Rossel, Carole Peyrin, Alexia Roux-Sibilon and Louise Kauffmann.  2022. “It Makes Sense, So I See It Better!  Contextual Information About the Visual Environment Increases Its Perceived Sharpness.”  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Human Perception and Performance, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 331-350, https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000993

DeafSpace was developed at Gallaudet University years ago to spatially support people who are hard-of-hearing.  As the article at the link below indicates, it is now being used to develop a major public space. Although DeafSpace was originally developed in one sensory context, when its principles are applied, we can all benefit, regardless of our sensory capabilities.  For example, many deaf individuals lip-read and being able to clearly see each other’s faces is often a big plus. Another example:  corridors that meet at right angles can lead to collisions when we can’t hear others coming—but today, many of us with a perfectly good sense of hearing may be listening to podcasts or something similar as we walk around and blocking out our acoustic world.  In DeafSpace, corridors do not meet at crisp right angles unless there are some sort of windows worked into corridor walls to supply views of other travellers or the walls of intersecting hallways are removed way before the intersection point so others can be seen; often it seems the sharp points at which the corridors would meet are lopped off and replaced by gently curving wall segments. Other generally useful aspects of DeafSpace are noted in…

We wrote before about the windowless dorm being built for students, and the negative impact it could have on them. Recent articles which report on the experiences of living in a windowless dormitory room not only highlight all the great things that natural light can do for us but also why people would agree to live in such places (for example, privacy and autonomy in units that have no windows but a private bathroom, just for the occupant). Also, in one of the structures: “There’s a large gym on the top floor, music practice rooms, a 3D-printing room, and, most important, ample study spaces flooded with natural light.” Windowless Dorms link to article

Humans are a young species and still working with the same sorts of mental apparatus and ways of processing incoming information from our physical world that we had in our first few generations as Homo sapiens.  Lots of us, lots of the time, like to think we’ve come so far from our earliest days as a species—this is a thought that often comes to people in opera houses listening to Mozart—but really, we haven’t. When we were just starting out, literally, there were a few things that really made us nervous.  They can be briefly summarized as: Being eaten by some big carnivore Starving to death Dying of thirst Freezing to death or the (maybe) opposite, overheating (baking) until dead Being too mentally exhausted to deal with points 1, 2, 3, and 4 although we probably didn’t think in terms of “mental exhaustion” but may have focused on “being ready” for whatever we might need to deal with. Our ancestors who were good at dealing with issues 1 – 5 lived and reproduced and we owe our existence today (however precarious it might be) to their efforts. Human brains evolve very, very slowly, so the same sorts of mental apparatus…

Flooding a space with natural light (minimizing glare with blinds as needed during certain times of the day, as needed) is biophilic design at its finest; it elevates our mood as well as our ability to learn and our cognitive performance (and you get bonus mood and performance points if the windows admitting that natural light can be opened to temperate breezes of clean, not polluted, air).  So is making a sleeping space as dark as is reasonably possible at night.  Using different colours and intensities of light at different times of the day and in different sorts of fixtures is another way to design biophilically.  We wake up and fall asleep in the best possible sorts of ways, when we’re experiencing relatively dim and warm light (this is also the sort of lighting when we collaborate, interact, with others best) and during the day we flourish in cooler brighter light (this light is great for concentrating and alertness, also).  To get the biggest impact, that warm light should be relatively low on our visual horizon, just like the sun is at the beginning and end of the day, in tabletop and floor lamps.  Just like the sun in the…

What have neuroscientists learned about plaza design that you can apply in your patio: Design for what you actually want to happen on that patio.If you enjoy barbequing, not compromise on space for the grill.  Want to feel the sun on your skin? Don’t build in the shade.  And so on. Also, zone, via seating, or whatever you can, for groups of different sizes or who might prefer to spend time in different ways. An elongated patio is likely to feel more spacious than a more square-ish one. Add gently moving water in a bubbler type fountain or whatever works best for you (a couple of feet tall in all is fine)—the sound and the visuals of the water will help keep people on the patio relaxed. Provide more seats than you’re likely to ever actually need.We prefer that no more than 70% of the seats around us are filled.  While you’re thinking seats—don’t forget the info on seat cushions as well as the material on safe seats with a view in this article and this one. Also, be biophilic, as discussed in this article LINK—use natural materials and ones that show their age gracefully, for example, and patterns (for…

There are ways that design can make it more likely that you’ll have a constructive, mutually-beneficial conversation with someone else—whether you’re trying to negotiate world peace or help your teenager understand that they do not, perhaps, at least yet, know everything. And most of the ways that design can encourage good talks are, sadly, lacking in this space where Putin and Macron recently had a tete-a-tete. For the best discussions: Tables need to be carefully considered. Round tables where everyone present can easily see into each others’ eyes will up participation rates.  A round table that fits all of the needed parties to a conversation can often be quite large, however, putting people sitting across from it at conversation degradingly long distances from each other and often, literally, not fitting in the room where the conversation is to be held.  Seated conversations should take place when the discussants are at about the same distance while they are seated that they would be if standing up and having the same conversation, generally at least 4 feet and probably less than 7 or 8, with exact distances varying by culture. Since round tables for various reasons are often not feasible, people will…

Abrams studied people with ADHD during the pandemic and reports that “Working from home has also presented challenges for adults with ADHD, including dealing with the loss of boundaries—such as a dedicated workspace or an on-site supervisor—that help them avoid distractions and provide cues about when to stop and start tasks. . . . [mental health care] providers have used a mix of old and new strategies to help people with ADHD function well during the pandemic. . . . For adults working from home, a clear workspace that contains only work-related items helps to limit distractions, Politi [Danielle Politi, PsyD, Multi-Health Systems, Inc.] said.  She also recommends scheduling frequent breaks and using the last 15 to 30 minutes of each workday to reset:  Clear your inbox and office space and make a plan for the following day.  . . .  People with ADHD can improve their functioning by seeking out optimal work times and settings.” Zara Abrams. 2022. “Helping Adults and Children with ADHD in a Pandemic World.”  Monitor on Psychology vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 68-74.

Our pets, at the very least, seem like our very good friends, and we can make sure that they enjoy living in our homes as much as we enjoy having them share it with us.  Pets are also a tremendous psychological support for their humans, particularly when those humans are stressed, because they can’t leave their home or for some pre-COVID reason (those stressors didn’t disappear), such as preparing for medical school exams. Research presented at meetings of the American Psychological Association, and certainly at other groups as well, reports that a full grown dog has the emotional and cognitive capabilities of a 2 or 2 and a half year old human—we don’t realize how “advanced” their doggie brains are, however, because our dogs don’t speak to us in a straightforward way in words we understand, although we learn generally what’s up with them as we become familiar with each of our pet’s systems of barks, whimpers, and exasperated moans.  Keeping dogs’ “human equivalent mental age” in mind as you think about making a house dog-friendly can be useful. Cats, of course, refuse to participate in any sort of research that would establish their “human equivalent mental age.” And fish,…

As the weather gets warmer, people move, and often people who are romantically linked decide to take the plunge and move in together. People who with tight enough bonds to decide to move in together may or may not have similar personality profiles.  As discussed in this article, it’s important to align place design with personality, and all that is easy when people moving in together have similar personalities, but what to do when they don’t? Everyone living in a home, even the dog, needs a home base, a place that’s theirs and theirs alone.  Home bases are pretty easy to deal with from a personality-in-place perspective.  Each should take the forms that the personality of the owner relishes. Life gets complicated in shared spaces.  How can the needs of different personalities be blended in a single space? If people with different personalities need to share spaces to sleep or work, it’s best to design for the most “design-restrained” personality present.  In a bedroom or home office shared by an introvert and an extravert, the design decisions made should be tailored to the introvert (see the linked to article, above, for details on the sorts of spaces where introverts and…

Men and women can experience spaces in slightly different ways from time to time: Women have a better sense of touch than men, in technical terms, they are more “tactically sensitive” than men. This is because basically everyone has the same number of nerve endings on the end of their fingers, for example, and since women are often shorter/smaller than men, for women those nerve endings are closer together, so women may note changes or problems with textures that men would not. Visually, men are more sensitive to fine detail and items moving quickly, while women excel at differentiating different colours generally, particularly various shades of red. Women and girls prefer redder colours than men, although both men’s and women’s favourite colours are most likely to be blue—as a result, females’ favourite colours are tended toward pinks and purples, for instance. Men usually prefer greener shades of blues, etc. Women are more responsive to changes in colour saturation and brightness than men. Read this article, to learn more about how colour saturation and brightness influence our emotional state.  Similarly, for colour pairs, women prefer pairs that are very light or very unsaturated more than men do. Viewing the colour pink…

Greenberg and teammates report that they “built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across six continents. . . . the patterns of correlations between personality traits and musical preferences were largely consistent across countries and assessment methods. For example, trait Extraversion was correlated with stronger reactions to Contemporary musical styles (which feature rhythmic, upbeat, and electronic attributes), whereas trait Openness was correlated with stronger reactions to Sophisticated musical styles (which feature complex and cerebral attributes often heard in improvisational and instrumental music).” Conscientiousness was linked to unpretentious music preference, agreeableness was associated with mellow and unpretentious music, and openness was tied to mellow, contemporary, and intense music preference.  There was a strong negative correlation between conscientiousness and intense music. Mellow music is romantic, slow, and quiet; unpretentious music is uncomplicated and relaxing; and intense music is distorted, loud, and aggressive. It is reasonable to apply these findings in contexts other than music.   Greenberg, S. Wride, D. Snowden, D. Spathis, J. Potter and P. Rentfrow.  2022. “Universals and Variations in Musical Preferences:  A Study of Preferential Reactions to Western Music in 53…

Turns out the sex of a robot makes a difference! While we might look at stereotyping issues, this research points out that preference is still biased to the female in this service industry. Read on… Seo evaluated responses to service robots in hotels and found that “female service robots generated more pleasure and higher satisfaction compared to that of male service robots, and its influence is amplified when the level of anthropomorphism is high [the robots are more human-like] rather than low. Findings highlight the benefit of female service robots in a hotel setting which is only effective when the service robot is humanized, which provides useful guidelines for hoteliers when applying service robots in their service settings.” Soobin Seo.  2022. “When Female (Male) Robot Is Talking to Me:  Effect of Service Robots’ Gender and Anthropomorphism on Customer Satisfaction.”  International Journal of Hospitality Management, vol. 102, 103166, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2022.103166

In many a boudoir scene on the silver screen, not only do candles predominate, but before the person to be romanced arrives, some scent is sprayed in the air and background music begins to play. As difficult as it is for me as a scientist to admit it, the directors and script writers again seem to be onto something that research can support. There is continuing debate about the effectiveness of pheromone type air fresheners which supposedly introduce odours into the air that potential romantic partners will be unable to resist.  While pheromone sprays are debatable, it is incontestable that humans do use scents to send messages, some that might be of monumental importance during romantic encounters.  We send signals about our mood, whether we’re happy or sad or excited (!), for example, and even smell differently when we’re concentrating—and none of these scents is simply tied to whether we’re sweaty or not.  Any scents added, need to be very subtle, so that they don’t overwhelm our olfactory messaging systems. It seems hard to resist the drive to add some sort of scent to a romantic space, however.  Flower odours are often selected and they are likely to put people,…

People putting together plans for new homes pass through a set of predictable phases.  The first is euphoria:  “Wow, I’m going to have the opportunity to do something new, to create the sort of home for myself and the people I’ll share it with that helps us live the lives we intend to live!” Euphoria is followed by confusion:  “What should my new home look and feel like?” And then terror:  “What should my new home look and feel like?” Creating a new home is an incredibly emotional experience, but one you can manage—and not only live through, but, dare I say it, enjoy. The first step to developing a new home is to identify the resources that you have at your disposal.  The first thing that comes to mind when people hear the term “resources” is “money,” and money is, as always important, but there are factors beyond the budget that need to affect your plans.  How much time do you, yourself, have to devote to the process?  If, realistically, you can contribute a few hours here and there to planning and executing, thinking about revitalizing a room is more realistic than redoing an entire floor or, gulp, your…

Ever wondered how you align with your friends and family? One of the things that’s clearest about space design is that everyone feels better when their personality aligns with the place that they find themselves. But who are you?  Who are those who come and visit or stay with you? One of the quickest ways to find out is to answer the questions on the TIPI survey developed by Professor Sam Gosling’s working group at the University of Texas.  It is located here. Take a minute and go and answer the questions on the TIPI—then come back so we can begin a conversation about your score’s design-related repercussions.  If you’re designing for someone else or for a group of people, you can, yourself, answer the TIPI questions for them and consider designing for group averages—with some exceptions noted below—it’s always best if people answer the questions for themselves. There are three aspects of personality that significantly effect how people use space and how spaces should be designed.  They are how open-to-experience (particularly new experiences) people are, conscientiousness, and, the frequently discussed factor: extraversion-introversion. If you are familiar with your own personality type, and develop some understanding of the personality types…

Binter and colleagues looked at how urban design affects child development.  They share that they “investigated the association between early-life urban environment and cognitive and motor function in children. We used data from 5403 mother–child pairs from four population-based birth-cohorts (UK, France, Spain, and Greece). . . . Higher greenness exposure within 300 m during pregnancy was associated with higher verbal abilities. . . . Higher connectivity density within 100 m and land use diversity during pregnancy were related to lower verbal abilities. Childhood exposure to PM2.5* mediated 74% of the association between greenness during childhood and verbal abilities. Higher exposure to PM2.5 during pregnancy was related to lower fine motor function. . . .  This study suggests that built environment, greenness, and air pollution may impact child cognitive and motor function at five years old. This study adds evidence that well-designed urban planning may benefit children’s cognitive and motor development.”   *From the BlissAir website: “PM2.5 refers to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) that have a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers, which is about 3% the diameter of a human hair.” Anne-Claire Binter and 18 others. 2022.   “Urban Environment and Cognitive and Motor Function in Children from Four European Birth Cohorts.” …

Faraji-Rad and Lee determined that  “Merely anticipating a future sad event motivates consumers to ‘accumulate happiness’ in order to enhance their ability to cope with the anticipated sadness later—a phenomenon that we call banking happiness.  To bank happiness, consumers not only choose positive stimuli over non-positive stimuli when given the choice. . .  Consumers bank happiness because of the lay theory that happiness is a resource that can be accumulated (i.e., banked) and consumed later.  . . .  believing that happiness is bankable increases consumers’ engagement with positive stimuli when anticipating sadness, possibly boosting the hedonic [pleasure-related] utility [value] consumers obtain from the positive stimuli and helping them to build a stronger buffer against the negative stimuli later.” Ali Faraji-Rad and Leonard Lee.  “Banking Happiness.”  Journal of Consumer Research, in press, ucab066, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucab066

Goldring and Bolger investigated how daily stressors influence lives and found that “Prior research shows that daily stressors lead to greater psychological distress. A separate body of research links daily stressors to physical symptoms such as backaches and stomach problems. We integrate these literatures by positing an interconnected causal system, whereby stressors lead to psychological distress which, in turn, leads to physical symptoms. Our integrated approach also includes causal effects in the opposing directions: Psychological distress can increase physical symptoms and physical symptoms can increase psychological distress. Put simply, causal effects are bidirectional. . . . some people are as much as four times as reactive as the average person, some people are not reactive at all, and other people are reactive in reverse directions (e.g., distress leads to fewer physical symptoms).” Megan Goldring and Niall Bolger. 2021.  “Physical Effects of Daily Stressors Are Psychologically Mediated, Heterogeneous, and Bidirectional.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 121, no. 3, pp. 722-746, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000396

As a gift for Christmas, The Space Doctors have written another poem for you in the style of Dr Seuss!  We hope you enjoy it! If you would like your very own higher resolution PDF copy to send to your friends and family do email us on vanessachampion@thespacedoctors.com. Otherwise feel free to share the image here. The Space in the Place! The How, The Why and The Wherefore, Did you know? Science-Informed Design Works! To read our first poem which we recited in person at Workplace Trends in London in October 2021, click here.

Science makes it clear that there are some hard and fast rules about spaces where people have great conversations—you can apply them throughout your home, creating multiple conversation zones—even if you don’t have any neighbours (or you’ve invited all your neighbours to your party so you can turn the music as loud as you’d like) and plan to turn the music at your soiree to speaker stressing levels—people will still try to have conversations and to a great extent will succeed because almost all of us are excellent lip readers. Places where people will have positive, pleasant conversations: Will allow everyone who wants to to make eye contact at any time they feel like it. Parties require the sorts of everyone sits in a ring facing towards the middle of that ring, sort of like how you sat in kindergarten during story hour.  People who can’t make easy eye contact can’t talk to each other, unless one of the conversants has, like your mother, eyes in the back of their head.  Circular tables encourage more collegial conversations while having people sit at the short ends of rectangular tables results in more “leader-lead” situations.  Whenever possible arrange seats so that people…

At this time of year we can become particularly attuned to the smells in our homes and offices, regularly because they’re not very good. If you actively manage the scents in your home and office now, when it’s a challenge to open the windows and air them out, you can put your olfactory system to work for you, not against you. Science has shown that: Making a space smell good, for example, like an event that you have pleasant memories of, will boost your mood and with it your problem-solving ability, creativity, and ability to get along with others. Similarly, when we’re in a space that we think smells clean we’ll be cleaner ourselves (e.g., help keep things tidy), and are also more likely to be fairer, more generous, trusting, and helpful to others. A scent that makes us feel nostalgic can also lead us to feel less lonely and boost our self-esteem. We’re less anxious when we smell orange, flowers, and vanilla and more relaxed when we’re in an area scented with lemon, mango, and lavender.  And a bonus – lavender can help people who have trouble falling asleep sleep better. Smelling lavender has also been tied to trusting…

If you are, don’t be surprised—the two of you bring very different mindsets to any design discussion. Designers have spent a lot of time thinking about design (no surprise there).  Even if you’ve been trying to figure out what do with your home’s look for a very long time, it’s almost definite that any designer you’re working with has still spent more time considering design opportunities and issues than you have. All that considering means that they’ve developed the skill set to notice conditions that are lost on you.  They  know about 10 different shades of white you could use on the moulding at the top of your walls that are absolutely indistinguishable one-from-another to you, and they can identify each from tiny chips yards away.  They can match those same whites at the home supply store without a swatch.  They’ve learned to really, really look at colour in ways you have just not had to.  And colour is only part of what they’ve been thinking about. Designers have also been trained to know how things are supposed to look and to notice other differences.  They will know if a mitred corner has all its bits coming together at the…

The warmer we are the safer we feel. Hornstein, Fanselow, and Eisenberger link feeling something warm feeling safe: “a physically warm stimulus was less readily associated with threat (compared to soft or neutral stimuli; Study 1) and was able to inhibit the fear response elicited by other threatening cues (compared to neutral stimuli; Study 2). Results showed that physical warmth resisted association with threat (Study 1) and not only inhibited the fear response but also led to lasting inhibition even after the warm stimulus was removed (Study 2).”  In the warm situation, an activated warm pack was placed in the study participant’s right hand. E. Hornstein, M. Fanselow, and N. Eisenberger.  “Warm Hands, Warm Hearts:  An Investigation of Physical Warmth as a Prepared Safety Stimulus.”  Emotion, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000925

New research from Jarvis and colleagues has been published. They looked at how living near greenspace impacted childhood development. It turns out, that it does 🙂 How did they do it? They report that “early childhood development was assessed via teacher ratings on the Early Development Instrument (EDI), and we used the total EDI score as the primary outcome variable. We estimated greenspace using percentage vegetation derived from spectral unmixing of annual Landsat satellite image composites. Lifetime residential exposure to greenspace was estimated as the mean of annual percentage vegetation values within 250 m of participants’ residential postal codes. . . .  We estimated the mediation effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), fine particulate matter (PM2·5), and noise levels using causal mediation analyses. . . . 1 IQR [inter quartile range] increase in percentage vegetation was associated with a 0·16 . . . increase in total EDI score, indicating small improvements in early childhood development. . . . Increased exposure to residential greenspace might improve childhood development by reducing the adverse developmental effects of traffic-related exposures, especially NO2 air pollution.” Ingrid Jarvis and 12 others. 2021. “Assessing the Association Between Lifetime Exposure to Greenspace and Early Childhood Development and the Mediation Effects…

Sometimes people to your home have some sort of “difference” that they’d rather not be publicly discussed (although today there are many fewer topics that fit into this category than in the past) but that will significantly influence their experiences in your home, and that you should foresee as you design if you ever intend to have guests visit. For example, someone visiting may have ADHD and not want other guests, for example, their boss to know this.  A rocking chair that they can pivot ever so slightly as they join in a conversation can help that person dispel energy and keep on track as a conversation partner. The value of the movement is that it helps them work off/dispel energy and retain focus. We’ll talk more thoroughly about designing for people with ADHD or who are on the autism spectrum in a future article. Visitors may also be colour blind or have cataracts, for example, which impair their vision.  There are all sorts of colour blindness, with all sorts of colour families being compromised in people, or not.  What sort of design ramifications are there if some of the visitors to your home might ever be colour blind?  Anything…

One of the things that’s clearest about space design is that everyone feels better when their personality aligns with the place that they find themselves. But who are you?  Who are the people who will visit your home? One of the quickest ways to find out is to answer the questions on the TIPI survey developed by Professor Sam Gosling’s working group at the University of Texas.  It is located here:  http://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/ten-item-personality-measure-tipi/ten-item-personality-inventory-tipi/ Take a minute and go and answer the questions on the TIPI—then come back so we can begin a conversation about your score’s design-related repercussions.  If you’re designing for someone else or for a group of people, you can, yourself, answer the TIPI questions for them and consider designing for group averages—with some exceptions noted below—it’s always best if people answer the questions for themselves. What next? There are three aspects of personality that significantly effect how people use space and how spaces should be designed.  They are how open-to-experience (particularly new experiences) people are, conscientiousness, and, the frequently discussed factor: extraversion-introversion. If you are familiar with your own personality type, and develop some understanding of the personality types of the heaviest users of the spaces you’re developing,…

From the previous post, another study by essentially the same group:  Aristizabal and colleagues also report that they collected data in spaces “allowed individuals to perform their typical workday task for 10 weeks. . . . After a 2-week acclimation period, participants were exposed to three biophilic conditions (visual, auditory and multisensory) as well as the baseline setting.” In the visual condition, participants viewed “Indoor plants, projections of greenery, and artwork displaying nature scenes.” In the auditory one they heard “Sounds of gentle streams, crickets, and birds native to the Midwest region of the United States” where data were collected. In the multisensory project phase, study participants experienced the biophilic sights and sounds described. In conclusion: “Participants felt more satisfied with their workplace conditions during the biophilic interventions compared to baseline conditions.  Participants reported feeling more satisfied with the aesthetic appearance and visual privacy in the visual and multisensory conditions.  Similarly, participants reported improvements in perceived productivity in the visual and multisensory conditions. . . . Results suggest that immersive biophilic environments can improve aspects of cognitive performance, environmental satisfaction and reduces stress in an office environment.” Sara Aristizabal, Bing Guo, Regina Vaicekonyte, and Carolina Campanella.  2021.  “Nature and Stress…

This is the time of year when there are often quite lively, shall we say, debates over where to set the thermostat in your home or office. Please consider this article a public service, one that can keep those conflicts in check. Research shows that our mental wellbeing, at least, is best at temperatures of around 70 degrees Fahrenheit (or 21 degrees centigrade) with humidity levels, if you can set them, of 40-70% when we’re awake and about 65 degrees Fahrenheit (or 18 degrees centigrade) while we sleep.  

Lee and Chen found that face masks may influence how far we choose to be from other people. The researchers report that via data collected through an online survey they found that “A smaller IPS [interpersonal space] was observed when participants faced confederates wearing surgical masks than in the no-mask condition. Female dyads tended to maintain a smaller IPS than did both male and mixed-sex dyads, and Taiwanese participants maintained a significantly larger IPS than did Mainland Chinese participants. . . . When facing a confederate who did not wear a face mask, the participants tended to maintain a larger IPS. . . . Taiwanese participants maintained the longest distance from a confederate without a face mask, whereas the Mainland Chinese participants maintained the shortest distance when encountering a masked confederate.”   Yu-Chi Lee and Yi-Lang Chen. 2021.  “Influence of Wearing Surgical Mask on Interpersonal Space Perception Between Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese People.”  Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 692404, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.692404

Kim and colleagues determined that “congenitally blind and sighted individuals share in-depth understanding of object colour. Blind and sighted people share similar intuitions about which objects will have consistent colours, make similar predictions for novel objects, and give similar explanations. Living among people who talk about colour is sufficient for colour understanding, highlighting the efficiency of linguistic communication as a source of knowledge.. . . People develop intuitive and inferentially rich ‘theories’ of colour regardless of visual experience.” Judy Kim, Brianna Aheimer, Veronica Manrara, and Marina Bedney.  2021.  “Shared Understanding of Color Among Sighted and Blind Adults.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 118, no. 33, e2020192118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2020192118

Trying to increase the likelihood that someone will eat something?  Consider Zhou, Chen, and Li’s findings:  “Despite being a fundamental food feature, the effect of food shapes has been underexplored. This study demonstrates that giving hedonic [pleasure-related] foods a round shape increases their desirability, choice probability, and consumption. However, this effect does not apply to utilitarian foods. Such asymmetric effects are attributed to the positive affect [emotion] elicited by a round shape and not to the food’s shape typicality, food knowledge, vividness, or fragility. . . . the effectiveness of giving hedonic foods a round shape is attenuated [weakened] by consumers’ health motivations; that is, the effect holds only for those with low health motivation.”   Shoujiang Zhou, Siwen Chen, and Shan Li.  “The Shape Effect:  Round Shapes Increase Consumers’ Preference for Hedonic Goods.”  Psychology and Marketing, in press, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21547

Cognitive learning is hard, hard brain work, whether you’re 8 or 80.  Spaces where you plan to learn new material, whether they’re a home schoolroom, a home office, or a classroom outside a home need to be carefully designed or instead of learning about trigonometry or butterflies or rules for running effective meetings, students will be coming up with new ways to pass the time until they can stop their lessons and move on to something they actually want to do. Just having a dedicated learning space at home or elsewhere sends a powerful message that encourages people to focus on learning.  When a group “spends” space on something, it signals to itself and others what its priorities are, and group members almost always want to excel at whatever is important to those it respects and feels socially tied to (this message was, however, not clearly transmitted to that awful kid in your fifth grade classroom who spent the school day making snide comments about whatever is being taught, and is now in prison). Educational spaces need to be appropriately maintained, nothing “says” “we don’t care” faster than peeling or chipped paint.  Also, to succeed people must feel that the…

The PARTY CHECKLIST! It’s probably been a while since you’ve been able to plan any sort of gathering that includes more than you and your cat.  Neuroscientists (who would no doubt by this time welcome an invitation to your party) would make these suggestions, for example, as you plan your bash: Want a high energy bash? Buy balloons, streams, etc., in saturated not very bright colours, like candy apple red and sapphire blue and pumpkin orange.  Want to be more low key? Pick decorations that are softer, more pastel shades, such as not very saturated but relatively bright ones, like pink and baby blues and sage greens. Warm surface colours encourage people to think others are friendly and dimmer, warm light (like that from candles or fires) is relaxing and makes us feel more positively toward others.Rev people up with cool bright light. In any space where you expect conversations, and want them to go well, make sure that there are either enough space so everyone who wants to can lean against the same table.For seated conversations, make sure that there are enough seats with legs of approximately the same length for all to sit in chairs or enough pillows…

In a shared bedroom the main difference would be to make sure that each child has some space to put out/display a couple of things that remind them about what they value about themselves and who they are, or at least what they aspire to be, and send the same messages to anyone, including parents, who enters the area.  These displays need to be curated, however, to keep our often-discussed enemy, visual clutter, at bay.  Everyone needs a territory and that is established with these displays as well as, whenever possible, separate beds, and even different rugs/lighting or similar demarcations for each child’s area of the room.  A screen that can be put up as needed to divide the room into multiple “home zones” can also help. See “Your Questions” for more tips.

You have some ability to customize the interior of your car to help you deal with situations you encounter as you drive. If you want to relax, the traffic has gotten your blood pressure up to really impressive levels, spritz the inside of your car with the scent of lavender, lemons, or oranges.  Want help keeping your mind from wandering? Smelling rosemary or peppermint may help some. Hearing traffic and sounds made by your car and around it are important for your safety.  If you decide to add sounds to your drive beyond the road sounds, etc., and want to relax, try quietly playing a nature soundscape, the sorts of acoustic environment you’d encounter in a meadow on a lovely spring day. Need to perk yourself up.  Do the obvious—play something with a rapid beat (some music you enjoy would be best here) at a loud but safe volume. Keep your car neat to keep yourself happy, well, at least as happy as you can be speeding along the freeway with some idiot driving right on your tail. Receipts lying around, crisp packets, etc., boost the visual complexity inside your car, which is a no-no as detailed here LINK and…

Loads of people are proclaiming that future mingling will be much less prevalent than in the past.  There’s even discussion of whether we’ll need offices in the future, for example here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210721-whats-the-purpose-of-the-office-and-do-we-still-need-it There are compelling reasons to believe, however, that after we’ve all been vaccinated we’ll continue to find ourselves in the same places with others—for reasons way beyond our desire to simply be sociable. We will continue to gather because we can only really communicate with each other when we are all in the same place at the same time.  We send messages to each other in a number of ways and with technology that’s currently available, many of those channels are blocked.  When we need to work with others to develop a strategy or come up with a creative or innovative solution, for example, we only really understand the nuance of what others are presenting when we’re in the same place at the same time. We’re used to using words and the inflections in our voices to talk with others.  But our facial expressions, gestures, body orientations, eye contact, distance from each other, and even our scent (not whether we’re sweating or not, we actually smell differently based…

So when they speak about seeing the world through Rose-coloured glasses, it seems the opposite is true if you’re feeling blue. Researchers have verified that being depressed influences how people see the world, literally; previous studies have shown that when people are depressed, whether they are on medication or not, they see colours as greyer than they actually are. Salmela, Socada, Söderholm, Heikkilä, Lahti, Ekelund, and Isometsä “confirmed that the processing of visual information is altered in depressed people, a phenomenon most likely linked with the processing of information in the cerebral cortex. The study was published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.” “Depression Affects Visual Perception.”  2021. Press release, University of Helsinki, https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/healthier-world/depression-affects-visua…  

Who would have thought that a little walk on a carpet can help reduce your stress level. Hoki, Sato, and Kasai’s research “focused on the effects of indoor flooring in the residential environment on stress, as flooring is a feature that the human body is in contact with for long periods of time. We objectively measured the extent of psychological stress perceived while walking on carpeting and on wood flooring.” Study participants “were asked to walk on carpeting and wood flooring for 10 min each. Their electroencephalogram (EEG) and skin impedance values were measured for each task.The α-wave content percentage in EEG data and skin impedance values were significantly higher just after walking on carpet than just after walking on wood flooring.  Walking on carpeting induces less stress than walking on wood flooring.”   Yoko Hoki, Kunio Sato, and Yulchi Kasai.  2016. “Do Carpets Alleviate Stress?”  Iranian Journal of Public Health, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 715-720.

If you want to improve your little grey cells and also make yourself happy, get yourself out into nature. Write yourself a “green prescription” and take a walk outside, in a park, forest or woods. Kuhn and colleagues report that “A whole-brain analysis [conducted via MRI] revealed that time spent outdoors was positively associated with grey matter volume in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and positive affect, also after controlling for physical activity, fluid intake, free time, and hours of sunshine. Results indicate remarkable and potentially behaviourally relevant plasticity of cerebral structure within a short time frame driven by the daily time spent outdoors. This is compatible with anecdotal evidence of the health and mood-promoting effects of going for a walk. The study may provide the first evidence for underlying cerebral mechanisms of so-called green prescriptions with possible consequences for future interventions in mental disorders.”   Simone Kuhn, Anna Mascherek, Elisa Filevich, Nina Lisofsky, Maxi Becker, Oisin Butler, Martyna Lochstet, Johan Martensson, Elisabeth Wenger, Ulman Lindenberger and Jurgen Gallinat. “Spend Time Outdoors for Your Brain – An In-Depth Longitudinal MRI Study.”  The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, in press, https://doi.org/10.1080/15622975.2021.1938670

Recently published research confirms links between thinking creatively and being in less energizing spaces.  Needle and Mallia  report that  “Open-office plans have become the dominant mode for creative workplaces, designed to encourage collaboration. . . .This  study surveys people working in advertising and the creative industries, assessing perceptions of productivity and satisfaction with work environment. A majority of respondents yearned for solitude to complete certain tasks. Findings suggest that open-office environments may indeed undermine creative productivity, not just among introverts, but others as well.” Also it is interesting to note that being able to see other people significantly increases how energised we are. Rose Needle and K. Mallia. “Creatives in the Office: Personality and the Environmental Effects of Workspace.”  Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, in press, https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2020.1770144

Article after article is trumpeting how much people are enjoying interacting with others again or how much they long to do so (see this one, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/insider/working-empty-newsroom.html ) Of course we’re glad to be with others again! We’re all desperate, whether we’re introverts or extraverts, for a good conversation. We communicate via a range of sensory channels, only a few of which can be transmitted via Zoom: we say words, those words are inflected in one way or another, we gesture, we stand at various distances and orientations to each other, we make eye contact or not with each other, our facial expressions change, all of which has meaning that matters and that we use to determine what whomever we’re talking to is REALLY saying.  Research is even starting to indicate that we smell differently at different times and those varying smells send whoever is nearby key messages also. With current technology, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with someone else, one that goes beyond superficial comments or banal topics, without seeing the white of their eyes, in real life.  

Recently, there’s been more attention to people, generally those getting a little long in the tooth, who are choosing to have relationships with others but not marry or move in together (see this article, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/well/family/older-singles-living-apart-LAT.html ) Beyond the practical reasons why someone might choose to “live alone together,” LAT, as it’s called, makes sense from a psychological perspective. During the course of our lives, we create homes that send messages to the world (and ourselves) about what’s important to us and what we value about ourselves. Many of us, by the time we’ve gotten to be older, have fine-tuned the stories our homes tell about us and can see the challenges of melding our tale with another’s as daunting.  Also, that melding will likely dilute “our story,” messages sent won’t as clearly reflect who we are as a person and what drives us forward. LAT takes courage, it’s not what our society expects when people commit to each other, but it maintains, and potentially strengthens, our commitment to ourselves.

In the fourth of our articles this month looking at the different design options you can try to improve your home at different price points, we suggest some tips and furnishings which cost a bit but are worth it! See what you think. You can improve the acoustic situation in your home by making sure that there are enough soft surfaces in place to muffle echoes. Echoing makes us tense.  It can keep us from talking, for example.  If you have a room with bare floors and only hard surface (not upholstered) furniture in it, for example, you may be able to rotate a rug or curtains (no natural light blockers, please) or upholstered/cushioned furniture into the space without spending any money at all and eliminate echoes.  If all of your “soft stuff” is already in use elsewhere, careful purchases can help eliminate echoing issues.   Plants cost money and they require upkeep over time. The plants that boost our wellbeing, mood, and cognitive performance, all while mentally refreshing our tired heads, are green and leafy and may be almost free.  You can choose to spend more for plants, but you can also choose to spend less.  Only one or…

So it seems that science is proving that we are affected by the moon’s cycle! Casiraghi and colleagues used “wrist actimetry to show a clear synchronization of nocturnal sleep timing with the lunar cycle in participants living in environments that range from a rural setting with and without access to electricity in indigenous Toba/Qom communities in Argentina to a highly urbanized postindustrial setting in the United States.  Our results show that sleep starts later and is shorter on the nights before the full moon when moonlight is available during the hours following dusk.  Our data suggest that moonlight likely stimulated nocturnal activity and inhibited sleep in preindustrial communities and that access to artificial light may emulate the ancestral effect of early-night moonlight.”   Leandro Casiraghi, Ignacio Spiousas, Gideon Dunster, Kaitlyn McGlothlen, Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, Claudia Valeggia, and Horacio de la Iglesia.  2021.  “Moonstruck Sleep: Synchronization of Human Sleep with the Moon Cycle Under Field Conditions.”  Science Advances, vol. 7, no. 5, eabe0465, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe0465

People with dementia are being given peace by creating personalised soundscapes for them. Talebzadeh’s work focused on “how a personalized soundscape can help those with dementia by providing clues regarding time of day and place. . . . Using a system called AcustiCare, a personalized soundscape is created with a customized algorithm that plays scheduled sounds at specific moments throughout the day. Through feedback, the system can refine the sounds to be played the next day, helping to reinforce time and space for dementia patients. ‘The sounds consist of a collection of natural sounds, birdsongs, outdoor sounds, water/rain sounds and kitchen sounds, music, bell sound, and similar,’ Talebzadeh said. ‘From these sounds, psychoacoustic parameters and metadata is used to obtain similarity information between the different sounds. This information is used to suggest a new sound related to the feedback findings.’” “Personalized Soundscape Could Help People with Dementia With Time, Place Recognition.”  2021. Press release Acoustical Society of America, http://acousticalsociety.org  

Virtual Reality has taken a turn for the better by incorporating smell! There is a new report which uses views and smells to augment the virtual reality to create calm spaces in nature for people. A Tomasi-lead team determined via “Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) — a new form of VR that incorporates the sense of smell into its augmented reality  . . . . that stimulating the olfactory system via scent in practitioner-administered virtual realities can trigger memory, cognition and emotion, and may improve the therapeutic benefits of augmented realities targeting chronic pain, anxiety and mood disorders. . . . the team created a [virtual forest and campsite] simulation complete with a virtual tent, picnic table, fire pit, logs and other objects to touch, and aromas of fresh bacon and toasted marshmallows.  Participants — all inpatient psychiatry patients that voluntary participated in the study — were immersed in the forest camp environment for 8–12-minutes, in weekly OVR sessions that coincided with their standard clinical treatment plans. Following the OVR sessions, participants reported significant and immediate improvements to their anxiety, stress and pain levels that lasted up to three hours after a session.” This study is published in Journal of Medical Research and…

Can seeing Red negatively influence Stock Market Liquidity? This is an interesting piece of research. We have written before about how the colour red influences our choices. In this month’s round up of Science News, we spotted an article by Bazley, Cronqvist, and Mormann published in Management Science in which they report “that using the color red to represent financial data influences individuals’ risk preferences, expectations of future stock returns and trading decisions. The effects are not present in people who are colorblind, and they’re muted in China, where red represents prosperity. Other colors do not generate the same outcomes. . . . ‘ Red = Danger in the West from an early age. ‘In Western cultures, conditioning of red color and experiences start in early schooling as students receive feedback regarding academic errors in red,’ Bazley said. Red is associated with alarms and stop signs that convey danger and command enhanced attention. . . . red color appears to prolong pessimistic expectations in relation to negative stock returns, while viewing the same information in black or blue leads to reversal beliefs.   He [Bazley] said, ‘This suggests the use of color may have broad implications for stock market liquidity during times of…

We like blue birds, which makes sense because humans definitely have a soft spot in their hearts for blue places and things. In this month’s science round up, there was more evidence that a blue hue is preferable! Thommes and Hayn-Leichsenring share that they “collected over 20,000 photos of birds from the photo-sharing platform Instagram with their corresponding liking data. . . . The colors of the depicted bird . . . significantly affected the liking behavior of the online community, replicating and generalizing previously found human color preferences. . . . There is a solid body of research on human color preferences indicating that blueish objects are generally preferred over objects with yellowish hues. . . . This has been explained by ecological valence, for example, blue being linked to good things such as clear sky and clean water, whereas potentially harmful objects such as rotten food are often yellow (Palmer & Schloss, 2020). . . . results closely correspond with . . . color preferences that were previously reported for colored squares, but also for objects like furniture and clothing (Schloss et al., 2013).” Katja Thommes and Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring.  2021. “What Instagram Can Teach Us About Bird Photography: The Most…

Temperature affects us all, and also how we perceive and like the space we are in. In our regular notes from science we picked up a recent study to share with you here. This research studied how temperature influences how much people like a space. Or not..! Participants in the study experienced “a virtual reality environment at three different temperatures (15°C, 22°C, 30°C). . . .  An EEG device was used to determine the cognitive activities of the participants during space navigation. In addition, an eye-tracking device was used in virtual reality goggles to identify the areas that participants were looking at. It was determined that the architectural preferences of the people changed depending on the temperature of the space. . . . “ Basically, they altered the temperature and then examined how people looked at their environments. “The architectural liking score average was at the lowest at the temperature of 30°C. The architectural liking average was higher at the 15°C temperature than the architectural liking at the 30°C, but lower than that of 22°C.” Essentially, keeping it at a comfortable 22°C is best.  Ilker Erkan. 2021.  “Cognitive Response and How It Is Affected by Changes in Temperature.” Building Research and Information, vol. 49,…

This is the article you need if you often entertain people from countries besides your own and you want them to feel comfortable. A questionnaire was sent to participants out in nine countries: Brazil, Canada, the USA, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. It turns out that in all these countries they scored the comfort of a luxurious bed higher than a simple bed and first-class seats higher than economy class. But all countries rate the comfort lower the longer they are sitting on them! The surprising difference between the USA & Canada compared with China & Germany. “The study suggests that in the USA and Canada softer beds, hammocks, more luxurious seats and softer pillows are scored as more comfortable compared with the other countries. There are indications that China and Germany prefer a harder mattress than in the other countries. For pillows, the differences between countries are large, which might show that much is influenced by habitude or hesitation to use something new. The Asian countries score the comfort of a brace neck pillow higher.”   Reference: Peter Vink, Shabila Anjani, Sumalee Udomboonyanupap, Golnoosh Torkashvand, Thomas Albin, Symone Miguez, Wenhua Li, Christian Reuter, and Amalia Vanacore.  2021….

What to Change First?  If you review your options and decide to remodel your current home, you need to decide what you should change first. In the articles in this month’s issue (May 2021 – New Home!) assume that if you’re staying in your home you’ll feel best about making primarily interior design sorts of changes there and that if architectural modifications seem in order, you’ll pack your bags and move on to a new house! Also, here we’re not going to talk about conditions in your home that can change from moment to moment, such as scents and sounds, we’ve covered those topics here and here, for example. Be True to You If there is something in your home that really annoys you, whatever it is probably fundamentally at odds with your self identity.  “Self identity” is psychology speak for how you think about yourself.  When something in the space where we live is inconsistent with how we think about our self, then we feel tense.  An example will make this clearer. If you feel that you are quite a neat-clean person, one that vigorously attacks any dust or dirt that finds its way into your home, and your…

If you’ve considered the stay-move list noted earlier and you’re going to find a new home, only relocate to a space that makes you feel good.  Don’t choose to move into a space unless being there is a positive experience for you, no matter what anyone else, in particular a salesperson, has to say. Whatever is prompting you to leave your current home should be a priority in your new one. For instance, if there is no place for privacy for residents now, then make sure they have privacy in your new place. The sorts of changes mentioned in the other articles in this month’s focus, (May 2021) on renovating a current home are a plus to find already in place in a new one—but if you’re buying new (or building new!) there are lots of additional things you should check out in a potential new home. The Ticklist for Choosing a New Home One of the most important things to consider when you’re considering a new home is whether you and the people you’ll share your home with tend to be more extraverted or introverted. In the course of your life, and in living with your housemates, you’ve probably…

Loads of people are proclaiming that future mingling will be much less prevalent than in the past.  There are compelling reasons to believe, however, that after we’ve all been vaccinated we’ll continue to find ourselves in the same places with others—for reasons way beyond our desire to simply be sociable. We will continue to gather because we can only really communicate with each other when we are all in the same place at the same time.  We send messages to each other in a number of ways and with technology that’s currently available, many of those channels are blocked.  When we need to work with others to develop a strategy or come up with a creative or innovative solution, for example, we only really understand the nuance of what others are presenting when we’re in the same place at the same time. We’re used to using words and the inflections in our voices to talk with others.  But our facial expressions, gestures, body orientations, eye contact, distance from each other, and even our scent (not whether we’re sweating or not, we actually smell differently based on our mood, for example) all provide vital information to whomever we’re spending time with….

The single most important message, design-wise, we can draw from our experiences during the pandemic related lockdowns is that we need to make sure our homes, going forward, provide us with options as to how we live our lives. Also that they provide us with the options to spend extended time in our homes, without respite. In essence, we need to ponder how to make our homes wonderful gilded (well, at least as gilded as we can afford) prisons. So, what does that mean for modifying our current homes and choosing new ones? Make sure that wherever you live allows you to do your job there, if you possibly can.  Some jobs can’t happen at home (it will be difficult to work at home if you’re a surgical nurse, for example!). Home office design is discussed in this article from The Space Doctors.  Any future lockdown could potentially be even longer than the ones we’ve already experienced, so if your home doesn’t work for your work, the harm that might be done to your professional reputation might be even more severe. Also, going forward, people will have greater expectations for the at-home workplaces of others.  Particularly during the early stages…

Ever wondered which way to face when you’re having your photo taken? Research completed by Park, Spence, Ishii, and Togawa can be useful next time you’re posing for a photo! This team explored  “the influence of the face orientation of a human model on the perception of their attractiveness and its downstream consequences on product evaluation. Across five experiments, we first demonstrate that consumers tend to perceive a model’s face showing his or her left cheek as more attractive than when showing the right cheek, even when the images are otherwise identical. More importantly, we demonstrate the downstream influence of face orientation on the evaluation of advertised products whereby the leftward (vs. rightward) model’s face increases the evaluation of the advertised product through perceived model attractiveness. . . .” Also they noted that ” consumers perceive those faces showing their left (vs. right) cheek as more prototypical, and that this perception of prototypicality elicits an aesthetic preference for the model’s leftward face which in turn carries over to influence product evaluation.” Jaewoo Park, Charles Spence, Hiroaki Ishii, and Taku Togawa.  2021.  “Turning the Other Cheek:  Facial Orientation Influences Both Model Attractiveness and Product Evaluation.”  Psychology and Marketing, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 7-20, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21398

Pontes and Williams’ recent research is useful whenever people are trying to encourage or discourage people from gambling, taking risks.  The investigators share that “In general, people make more risk averse choices, gambling less and less often when primed with [shown] the color red over other colors. . . . But when participants feel lucky or are from Asian Chinese backgrounds the effect is reversed and they take more risks when primed with the color red.” Nicolas Pontes and Laura Williams.  2021. “Feeling Red Lucky?  The Interplay Between Color and Luck in Gambling Settings.” Psychology and Marketing, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 43-55, https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21408

Research by Thygesen and colleagues indicates that spending a little extra to provide greater access to green spaces for children may be money well spent. The Thygesen-lead team reports that when they reviewed data collected in Denmark for “individuals, who were born in Denmark between 1992 and 2007 . . . and followed for a diagnosis of ADHD [Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] from age 5, during the period 1997–2016. . . . Individuals living in areas defined by sparse green vegetation . . . had an increased risk of developing ADHD, compared with individuals living in areas within the highest [levels of green space]. . . . findings suggest that lower levels of green space in residential surroundings, during early childhood, may be associated with a higher risk of developing ADHD.” Malene Thygesen, Kristine Engemann, Gitte Holst, Birgitte Hansen, Camilla Geels, Jorgen Brandt, Carsten Pedersen, and Soren Dalsgaard.  2020.  “The Association Between Residential Green Space in Childhood and Development of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder:  A Population-Based Cohort Study.”  Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 128, no. 12, https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP6729

As we start to be inoculated, worldwide, it does start to seem likely that someday soon we may again find ourselves on airplanes, actually travelling, maybe even for fun.  Remember vacation? Airplane Design from an Environmental Psychology Perspective. Airplane design does just about everything wrong from an environmental psychology perspective. Some prisons may be better places to spend time than airplanes. One of the most challenging part of being on an airplane is that we have so little control of our experiences while we’re there.  We start to loose opportunities to make our own decisions when we step into the terminal at the airport.  It is generally viewed as bad form to do anything except exactly what the security teams at the screening stations suggest.  Once we’re on the plane, we can’t exit early, no matter how annoying the person sitting next to us is and on many flights, we can’t even change seats.  Whatever our personality, the lack of control we feel on airplanes makes us very tense. On airplanes, we often find ourselves closer to other people than we’d generally choose to be, although some airlines, at least at this stage in the COVID pandemic are placing passengers…

In another of our science-based research short reports we bring you this lovely study. Dzhambov and teammates probed links between the presence of indoor and outdoor greenery and the wellbeing of people during the COVID pandemic. They found via data collected using a survey that “Greenery experienced both indoors and outdoors supported mental health. . . . We employed two self-reported measures of greenery experienced indoors (number of houseplants in the home and proportion of exterior greenery visible from inside the home) and two measures of greenery experienced outdoors (presence/absence of a domestic garden and availability of neighborhood greenery). . . . The relative abundance of greenery visible from the home or in the neighborhood was associated with reduced depressive/anxiety symptoms and lower depression/anxiety rates. Having more houseplants or a garden was also associated with some of these markers of mental health. . . . [Study participants] who spent most of their time at home during the COVID-19 epidemic experienced better mental health when exposed to more greenery. Our findings support the idea that exposure to greenery may be a valuable resource during social isolation in the home.” Angel Dzhambov, Peter Lercher, Matthew Browning, Drozdstoy Stoyanov, Nadezhda Petrova, Stoyan Novakov, and…

Humans “communicate” extensively via scents, according to research recently published by Hofer, Chen, and Schaller; these findings support subtle scentscaping. In another of our “in the news” articles, here is some really interesting information to wow your colleagues with. Hofer and colleagues found that  “People readily perceive and react to the body odors of other people, which creates a wide range of implications for affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses. . . . . Like physical appearance, body odor reflects personal characteristics and temporary circumstances (e.g., people smell differently depending on their sex, age, health, and even transient emotional states; de Groot, Semin, and Smeets, 2017). . . . Humans have a sophisticated olfactory system that discriminates between a wide range of scents—including the odors of other people. The perceptual processing of body odors occurs through neural mechanisms responsible for the processing of a wide range of social information obtained through various sensory modalities, and this processing typically occurs without conscious awareness. . . . The implication is that just as the human brain evolved to efficiently extract information from other individuals’ appearances, it also evolved to efficiently extract information from their smells.” Marlise Hofer, Frances Chen, and Mark Schaller. 2020.  “What Your…

When it’s cold we need more social warmth. Fay and Maner found that “Laboratory studies have linked variability in temperature to the psychology of social affiliation. In colder ambient environments, for example, people report greater loneliness, and they pursue both physical warmth and social affiliation (i.e., social warmth). Here, a field experiment tested whether tactile warmth [basically, touching something warm] eliminates the effect of colder ambient temperatures on desires for social affiliation. Consistent with previous research, people expressed greater intentions to affiliate on colder days. However, tactile warmth eliminated this effect. On colder (but not warmer) days exposure to a tactile warmth manipulation eliminated heightened desires for social affiliation. Findings suggest that seemingly subtle changes in temperature can have important implications for the psychology of social affiliation, and such findings apply to real-world contexts outside the laboratory.” Adam Fay and Jon Maner.  2020. “Interactive Effects of Tactile Warmth and Ambient Temperature on the Search for Social Affiliation.”  Social Psychology, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 199-204, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000407

Yes, research indicates that some shapes are cuter than others; while this research at first might not appear to be very useful, it can be handy the next time you’re selecting a baby gift, redecorating a child’s room, or engaged in some other similar pursuit. Cho and team report that “229 participants completed a task in which they modified a rectangle for the parameters of size, colour, angle, height, -width ratio, and roundness to create a ‘cute rectangle.’ As predicated, the  ‘cute rectangles’ created by participants were significantly smaller, lighter, more tilted, or rounder than the reference shape.” During the online study, participants adjusted the form, e.g., the shape, tilt, etc. of a rectangle so that it seemed “cuter.” Sookyung Cho, Jason Dydynski, and Christine Kang.  “Universality and Specificity of the Kindchenschema:  A Cross-Cultural Study on Cute Rectangles.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000338  

The bottom line of this research is that we need larger spaces and look out onto greenery, awe also need natural lighting, better acoustics, art, greenery and privacy… Design-depression links have been identified using data collected via web-based surveys in Northern Italy during a pandemic lockdown that lasted over two months: “houses became the only place where people slept, ate, worked, practiced sports, and socialized. . . . . living in apartments less than 60 square meters with poor views and scarce indoor quality is associated with, respectively, 1.31 . . .  1.368 . . . . and 2.253 . . . . times the risk of moderate-severe and severe depressive symptoms. . . . . Housing design strategies should focus on larger and more livable living spaces facing green areas. . . . Small apartments without habitable balconies, with a poor housing quality such as a little natural lighting and acoustic comfort, a low thermo-hygrometric comfort, the absence of soft qualities in the living quarters (e.g., art objects, green plants), and living spaces that do not guarantee adequate privacy during phone calls for work or personal reasons, were much more frequent in individuals with moderate-severe and severe depressive symptoms.” These findings should…

Mullen and colleagues confirm how important it is to breathe clean air and their work supports efforts to make sure air inside buildings is filtered. The researchers report that  “Fine particulate air pollution is harmful to children in myriad ways. While evidence is mounting that chronic exposures are associated with reduced academic proficiency, no research has examined the frequency of peak exposures. . . . [the researchers examined] the percentage of third grade students who tested below the grade level in math and English language arts (ELA) in Salt Lake County, Utah primary schools . . . where fine particulate pollution is a serious health threat. More frequent peak exposures were associated with reduced math and ELA proficiency, as was greater school disadvantage. High frequency peak exposures were more strongly linked to lower math proficiency in more advantaged schools. Findings highlight the need for policies to reduce the number of days with peak air pollution.” Casey Mullen, Sara Grineski, Timothy Collins, and Daniel Mendoza. 2020.   “Effects of PM2.5 on Third Grade Students’ Proficiency in Math and English Language Arts.”  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 17, no. 18, 6931, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186931

Intentionally adding water to a space is a good idea, as long as that water stays where it belongs—rogue water from a broken pipe is a psychologically debilitating stressor. Looking at water that’s gently moving is tremendously relaxing to us.  That’s why there’s a fish tank in every dentist’s office.  Research shows that we’re calmer when we look at a fish tank even when there aren’t fish in it—but fish tanks without fish get the neighbours talking.  Research has shown that looking at moving water can even bring down blood pressure readings. Seeing gently moving water also helps us restock our levels of mental energy after we’ve depleted them doing knowledge work—so a few minutes looking at a moving water can help you do your best at solving puzzles, thinking creatively or whatever you choose to focus your brain on accomplishing. Hearing tranquilly moving water also helps us mentally refresh, as discussed in this article on nature sounds. Remember that desktop fountain your aunt gave you and you threw into the back of your closet.  Now’s the time to dig it out and put it to work.

Most offices, even if they’re used by well-known people are unseen by most of us.  Titans of industry and even many public officials spend their “office hours” working in places that only their professional colleagues ever see—except if those offices are part of a worksite redone by a popular designer and get included in a flashy, magazine article presenting work by that design group. One of the few offices that most of us have, however, seen photos of over the years is the Oval Office, the workplace home of the US president, located in the White House in Washington DC. Each time that a new president takes possession of the Oval Office, there are changes, often many changes in its appearance—lots of these modifications are made nearly entirely to signal a policy interest or political concern of the new president. When Joe Biden became president he made oodles of changes to the Oval Office, although not so many that Donald Trump would be confused if he found himself invited back for a visit.  Doors and windows stay in the same place, even when administrations change, and the presidential desk, chair, other seats in the rooms, and occasional tables seem locked…

Robles and colleagues make it official—natural fractals really are a visual plus!  They determined that adults and children as young as 3 respond to these fractal patterns in the same way.  The Robles, Taylor, Sereno, Liaw, and Baldwin team  found that “Before their third birthdays, children already have an adult-like preference for visual fractal patterns commonly seen in nature. . . . We found that people [both adults and children] prefer the most common natural pattern, the statistical fractal patterns of low-moderate complexity . . . ’ Robles said. . . . The aesthetic experience of viewing nature’s fractals holds huge potential benefits, ranging from stress-reduction to refreshing mental fatigue, said co-author Richard Taylor. . . . . [Taylor also states:] ‘This study shows that incorporating fractals into urban environments can begin providing benefits from a very early age.’. . . .[Taylor] and co-author Margaret Sereno . . . also have published on the positive aesthetic benefits of installing fractal solar panels and window blinds.”  The study by Robles, Taylor, Sereno, Liaw, and Baldwin is published by Nature:  Humanities and Social Sciences Communication. “Study Finds That by Age 3 Kids Prefer Nature’s Fractal Patterns.”  2020.  Press release, University of Oregon, https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-finds-age-3-kids-prefer-natures…

Tarlao, Steffens, and Guastavino’s work verifies that many factors besides the actual noises themselves influence perceptions of acoustic experiences. The researchers report that “Previous soundscape research has shown a complex relationship between soundscapes, public space usage and contexts of users’ visits to the space. . . . The present study is a comparative analysis of in situ questionnaires collected over four study sites in Montreal . . . . in both French and English. . . .  The analyses. . .. . suggest[s] that younger people, women, and extraverted people occupy the public space more in groups, and that people in groups rate the soundscape as more pleasant and less eventful. Older people and women were found to be more sensitive to noise, and more sensitive people tended to perceive the soundscape as less pleasant and less monotonous.” Cynthia Tarlao, Jochen Steffens, and Catherine Guastavino.  “Investigating Contextual Influences on Urban Soundscape Evaluations with Structural Equation Modeling.”  Building and Environment, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2020.107490   

Methorst and colleagues report that they “examine[d] the relationship between species diversity and human well-being at the continental scale, while controlling for other known drivers of well-being. We related socio-economic data from more than 26,000 European citizens across 26 countries with macroecological data on species diversity and nature characteristics for Europe. Human well-being was measured as self-reported life-satisfaction and species diversity as the species richness of several taxonomic groups (e.g. birds, mammals and trees). . . . bird species richness is positively associated with life-satisfaction across Europe. We found a relatively strong relationship, indicating that the effect of bird species richness on life-satisfaction may be of similar magnitude to that of income. . . . this study argues that management actions for the protection of birds and the landscapes that support them would benefit humans.” Joel Methorst, Katrin Rehdanz, Thomas Mueller, Bernd Hansjurgens, Aletta Bonn, and Katrin Bohning-Gaese.  “The Importance of Species Diversity for Human Well-Being in Europe.”  Ecological Economics, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106917  

Mental and physical work can take multiple forms.  Mental work is doing the book keeping for your business or some other “knowledge-“ type work or maybe even thinking creatively to solve some sort of problem or just because.  Physical work ranges from exercise to the laundry to adding a room onto your home to many other things that, for the faint of heart among us, lead us to sweat just thinking about them. The single most important thing that the design of a place where you’ll be doing any sort of work needs to do is signal to you that work is not only planned, but imminent.  Silent signals sent by spaces are, for the many, individual.  If since you started grade 1, a terribly scary looking stuffed owl has watched you from the corner of your desk as you’ve worked, give that owl a quick dust and make sure it’s sitting on the corner of your desk.  If you’ve always been motivated to work out more vigorously by seeing yourself in a mirror as you toil away, make sure that your exercise area has a conveniently placed mirror.  All this is a lot like making sure you have the…

Wang and colleagues link clothing worn and food selections made, it may be possible to apply their findings  more generally, but whether this sort of extension is reasonable will need to be directly investigated.   The Wang-lead team found that “formal and informal clothes styles can activate different clothes-image associations and thus make consumers more likely choose a food type (healthy or unhealthy) that is congruent with a specific set of clothes-image associations, referred to as clothes-food congruence. For example, wearing formal clothes can activate such formal-clothes associations as being self-controlled and organised. Formal- (vs. informal-) clothes associations are perceived to be congruent with healthy (vs. unhealthy) food choices. Hence, we suggest that clothes-food congruence mediates the relationship between clothes-image associations and food choice.” Xuehua Wang, Xiaoyu Wang, Jing Lei, and Mike Chao.  “The Clothes That Make You Eat Healthy:  The Impact of Clothes Style on Food Choice.”  Journal of Business Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.10.063  

Whether you’re doing mental or physical work, the space you are in should come complete with lots of natural light.  Natural light is good for our mood and that has benefits for how good we are at problem solving, thinking creatively, getting along with others, basically all the things required for modern life. Since there are times when natural light is just not sufficient (the extreme case of this is at night, of course).  Science also makes it clear what sorts of bulbs you should buy to help you perform as best as best you can—and never buy those bulbs with the coloured glass globes that are so popular at Halloween and at the end of the year, always use ones with clear glass.  Warmer bulbs and somewhat lower light levels help you relax enough to do creative sorts of brain work well and communicate positively with others, cooler and brighter lights are great for boosting concentration, however, or something physical.  Circadian lighting is best, see this article for more information. Prolonged mental work is mentally exhausting, and when we’re exhausted mentally, nothing is as refreshing as looking at a green leafy plant or two (not more, more makes visual…

The space in this photograph is a fine place to spend some time. Nothing says “cosy winter afternoon” faster than a fireplace fire. Staring into those flames is, what’s known in the psych biz, as “cognitively restorative.” Cognitive restoration is a fancy way of saying that looking at that fire helps us restock our levels of mental energy after we’ve depleted them doing something that saps our brain’s reserves, such as concentrating on solving a problem—which explains why after a long week in an office, spending time staring at a fire makes you feel so good and ready to tackle the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper.  No fireplace?  You can get the same effect by looking into a candle flame or an aquarium. The bulbs in the lamps in this room seem warm, which will help anyone lazing about feel calm and relaxed.  Warm light also make it that more likely that the people mingling in this space will feel sociable. Looking at wood grain helps us beat stress also, so a coffee table like the one shown between the sofas in this room is always a good idea in any place you want to calm down and feel…

Are you following The Great British Bake-Off?  If you are, that’s great because Bake-Off’s sets are doing all sorts of good things from an environmental psych perspective. The Bake-Off happens in a tent, which is pretty astounding.  Except over campfires, when toasting a marshmallow, is about as sophisticated as cooking gets, not much takes place food-wise outside.  There’s research indicating that doing a usual activity in an unusual location can spur us to think more creatively, which may be why so many yummy things seem to happen on Bake-Off. Spending time in natural light has a positive effect on what’s going in our heads, and there is plenty of daylight in the Bake-Off tent.  It flows into the space from all angles.  When we’re in natural light our cognitive performance improves (so deciphering confusing technical challenge directions is less of an issue) along with our mood.  When our mood gets a boost, we’re better at things such as problem solving, coming up with innovative solutions, and getting along with other people, for example.  That better getting along no doubt is a real plus when a camera man gets too close and things are just not going well after a soufflé…

Happily, for most of us, most of the time, are noses are doing their job and we can pick up odours in the world around us.  Scientific studies consistently link particular smells to particular outcomes. Before thinking about any particular smells, it’s important to know that when a person smells a smell that they themselves categorize as pleasant, their mood improves, that means they’re better at problem solving, creative thinking, and getting along with other people, for example.  We may have pleasant links to a smell because it was present in a place where we formed a happy memory or because we associate it with someone, we hold dear, for example.  Across cultures, many people have positive evaluations of floral smells.  Smelling pleasant scents helps us keep our stress levels in check.  Also, when we’re in a pleasantly scented space, we feel that we’ve spent less time there than if it’s not pleasantly scented, so it’s great that so many laundry detergents smell good; that helps us feel that we’ve spent less time in doing laundry. We also tend to linger in spaces that smell extra good, so you can use scents to influence where people spend time in your…

Winter – This is temperature tango time, the months of the year when there are lots and lots of heated debates about where to set the thermostat. Science can end this discussion before it does any more damage to what might otherwise be positive relationships. The research is clear: at temperatures set between 68 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit (20 and 23.3 degrees centigrade), with humidity levels from 40% to 70%, our cognitive performance is optimized.  To think and reason to your full potential, keep your thermostat in this range.  Some research identifies the midpoint of this spread as the single best temperature to set.  We sleep best at temperatures around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3 degrees centigrade). Clearly, there are some conditions that must be recognized when setting a temperature.  For example, fuel costs and environmental impacts can affect the temperatures at which people feel comfortable because these sorts of concerns can generate stress and, as with many things, when people are motivated, they can find all sorts of conditions pleasant enough. Also, dress influences best temperatures.  If you love to wear heavy wool sweaters and socks, odds are you find 74 degrees F (23.3degrees C) sweltering. You can use all sorts…

Seeing oneself in a mirror makes it more likely we’ll follow the rules that our society has set for us, so they’re good options for places such as entry areas where properly stowing boots and mittens is desirable. We’re also less likely to eat unhealthy foods that we select for ourselves when we see ourselves in a mirror.  However, people who are alone, perhaps because they’re older, can benefit from eating in a location where they can see themselves in a mirror; the mirror can up the appeal of the food taste-wise, for example.  Sometimes eating loses its appeal to people living alone and they skip too many meals, for instance.

Since the first of our ancestors set up a home and cared about the experiences of people living there, there has been environmental psychology. Whenever people developing or managing spaces have cared about making sure that people, individually and in groups, work to their full potential, get along with others, think creatively, or, in short, do or don’t do a myriad of things, environmental psychologists have been at work. Environmental psychology was formally recognized as a field in the 1960s by the American Psychological Association and others. Environmental psych was originally known as architectural psychology but changed its name to environmental psych to recognize that some research and practical work involves the design of objects.  Today, environmental psychologists study and help create all sorts of areas, indoors and out, all with the goal of helping people live the sorts of lives they have planned, via design. Environmental psychologists consider issues such as: How are our emotions and behaviour affected by surface colours? Patterns?  Colours of light? What about light intensity? How do textures influence us emotionally? Are some naturally calming? Is it important whether we see them or feel them? How do sounds affect our mental state? What sorts of…

People wearing or near more saturated colours are perceived as being more extraverted and open to experience, than people who aren’t; apparently viewers judging others don’t consider the possibility that a sweater or shirt we’re wearing may have come to us via a sibling or cousin who is Marie Kondo’ing their life. Pazda and Thorstenson found that people “surrounded by (or wearing) high-chroma [saturation] colours were perceived as more extraverted and open than when surrounded by (or wearing) low-chroma colours.” A.Pazda and C. Thorstenson. 2019.  “Colour Intensity Increases Perceived Extraversion and Openness for Zero-Acquaintance Judgments.”  Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 147, pp. 118-127, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid/2019.04.022

In 2020, Classic Blue was named colour of the year by Pantone Color Institute, a leading source of colour expertise, the Pantone Color Institute provides colour insights and solutions and announces a different colour every year. Selecting Classic Blue as the colour for 2020 has proved a prophetic choice.  People crave familiarity when stressed, and 2020 has been quite a stressful year for many individuals—Classic Blue is nothing if not a familiar colour.  Also, blues tend to be linked to thoughts of credibility, trustworthiness, and competence, all of which are desirable associations as the world collectively tunnels its way out from under a pandemic. Across the planet, people are also more likely to select a blue as their favorite colour than any other colour, and Classic Blue is a middle-of-the-road blue, so people are likely to have positive feelings about its use, on clothes, appliances, furnishings, and throughout our worlds. An additional benefit of Classic Blue:  people generally feel cooler in a space that features cool colours, so maybe its use will save a little on the energy consumed for air conditioning as our climate warms. Bravo Pantone for picking Classic Blue as the colour of the year for 2020.  You’ve…

If you or someone you know has colour blindness you might find that you are having difficulty identifying and differentiating between certain colours. Often the struggle is between red, green and yellow, some confuse reds and blacks and others see colours as slightly faded. Both people who are colour blind and those who are choosing colours for spaces that will be used by people who are colour blind will find the information here (http://colourblindpal.com) handy.  Tools at the Colour Blind Pal site allow people with colour vision to see the world as a colour blind person does and to identify colours that are easily distinguished, etc., by colour blind individuals.

Infants have colour vision, just like adults, using only black and white in spaces for them isn’t desirable.  Children are more apt to say that their favorite colour is red than adults, but actually, do generally prefer environments heavy on cool surface colours. As kids age and become oldsters, very old oldsters, the yellow of the lens of their eyes starts to yellow and that causes their colour vision to evolve as well.  As we get old, we also start to see colours as less saturated than they actually are, which not only changes the experience of particular colours already in place but also options that are selected for new use, all of which can lead to somewhat strained conversations between senior citizens and others, all looking at the same things. 

[restrict] To settle a continuing dispute in many homes, women do indeed have better colour vision than men (men’s vision is more tuned to moving objects than women’s).  So, if you’re trying to decide if two colours of paint or whatever are the same or different, rely on a woman’s opinion. While we’re on the subject of gender and vision, it’s important to note that females prefer redder shades than males, so the blue that’s their favourite is likely to be a little different than the blue that’s the favourite of males they share space with.

Around the world, when people are asked what their favourite colour is they are more likely to say it is blue than any other colour.  The colour that people are most likely to say is their least favourite colour is a particularly yellow-ish yellow-green.  You know what your own favourite colour is and also the favourite colours of whomever you share your home with, and you should use them whenever appropriate.  Knowing about blue and yellow-green can come in handy if you’re painting rooms in your home before you put it up for sale or something similar.  If you want perspective buyers to think more positively about your home, paint spaces blue. 

Seeing the colour pink seems to help women think more optimistically.  Maybe this is the colour to be looking at while working with a new recipe for the first time, working out your life-plan or embarking on a do-it-yourself home renovation project.