Abstract
Despite recent progress in the research of people’s emotional response to the environment, the built—rather than natural—environment’s emotional effects have not yet been thoroughly examined. In response to this knowledge gap, we recruited 26 participants and scrutinized their emotional response to various urban street scenes through an immersive exposure experiment using virtual reality. We utilized new physiological monitoring technologies that enable synchronized observation of the participants’ electroencephalography, electrodermal activity, and heart rate, as well as their subjective indicators. With the newly introduced measurement for the global visual patterns of the built environment, we built statistical models to examine people’s emotional response to the physical element configuration and color composition of street scenes. We found that more diverse and less fragmented scenes inspired positive emotional feelings. We also found (in)consistency among the physiological and subjective indicators, indicating a potentially interesting neural−physiological interpretation for the classic form−function dichotomy in architecture. Besides the practical implications on promoting physical environment design, this study combined objective physiology-monitoring technology and questionnaire-based research techniques to demonstrate a better approach to quantify environment−emotion relationships.
Highlights
IntroductionAs a result, deriving from the classic, phenomenological paradigm, which is mainly based on subjective experiences and feelings from a macroscopic perspective, a new research paradigm has emerged in the last decade
Through the comparison of the two groups of influencing factors, we found that the natural elements in the street view and the proportion of blue-class and green-class colors had significant impacts on people’s subjective feelings
The findings show that the proportion of vegetation/greenish colors in urban street scenes would significantly and positively affect various human emotions, including the comfort and vitality feelings, which is consistent with the findings in previous research on the stress-reduction and restorations effects of vegetation [20,23]
Summary
As a result, deriving from the classic, phenomenological paradigm, which is mainly based on subjective experiences and feelings from a macroscopic perspective, a new research paradigm has emerged in the last decade. It focuses on places, spaces, and the individual feelings amid them, and uses quantitative methods to explore the impact of physical settings on human perception in a logical positivist manner. Spaces, and the individual feelings amid them, and uses quantitative methods to explore the impact of physical settings on human perception in a logical positivist manner This paradigm has become the basis for the emerging school of evidence-based design [10,11]
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