Rating Experiences
Collect more useful data
Collect more useful data
Ties to evaluations and interpretations
Recently completed research indicates consistent responses to music in multiple cultures. Putkinen, Zhou, Gan, Yang, Becker, Sams, and Nummenmas found that “emotional music evokes similar bodily sensations across cultures. . . . The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. . . . The study was conducted in collaboration with Aalto University from Finland and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) as an online questionnaire survey.
Forrester and colleagues studied how being a fan of a team influences responses to that team’s team colors. They 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 colors 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.
Horton, Adam, and Galinsky’s work with clothing can likely be extended to other situations with selected designed elements. They 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. . . .
Figueiro and teammates continue their research into circadian lighting. The group reports on data collected at night: “Four ceiling lighting configurations, using combinations of direct and indirect lighting, were implemented along with one design that utilised local lighting. Every design delivered the same high level of circadian-effective lighting to participants. Saliva samples were obtained to measure nocturnal melatonin suppression.
Tian, Alaei, and Rule study signals sent by an individual’s physical appearance; their findings can likely be extended to signals sent by design-related choices made by people. Tian and team report that they “examined whether cues to people’s music preferences in their physical appearance and expressive poses help to guide social interaction. We found that perceivers could detect targets’ music preferences from photos of their bodies, heads, faces, eyes, and mouths (but not hair) and that the targets’ apparent traits (e.g., submissiveness, neatness) undergirded these judgments.
Barbieri and colleagues probed the repercussions of positive, aesthetic-based experiences. They report that “aesthetic appreciation promoted curiosity-driven behaviour while it was negatively associated with anxiety. These results were consistent with the idea that aesthetic appreciation could act as a ‘valve’, prompting the individual to perceive curiosity (i.e. to consider novelty as a valuable opportunity to acquire new knowledge) rather than anxiety (i.e. to consider novelty as a risk to be avoided). . .
Turoman and Vergauwe evaluate what sorts of experiences we find most distracting. They report that they “examined the effects of the task relevance and multisensory nature of distractors on working memory performance under high and low memory load. . . . we found conclusive evidence against a difference in how unisensory and multisensory distractors affected working memory performance. . . . when distractors were made partly task relevant . . . multisensory distractors disrupted working memory performance more than unisensory distractors on average. . . .
Latini and associates probed how well brains function in biophilicly designed spaces, finding cognitive performance improves in biophilic environments. They 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. . . .