2023 Blogs

CADRE, HKS, and Uplift Education have written a guide to designing learning environments that support social and emotional learning, which is available free of charge (“Enriched Environments to Support Social and Emotional Learning:  A Visual Design Guide,” https://www.cadreresearch.org/enriched-environments ).  The webpage from which this resource can be downloaded effectively describes it: “This visual design guide contains 18 evidence-based design strategies, to be used when designing enriched learning environments to supp

Gracheva and Groen review the implications of onsite and external coworking sites for large office-based organizations.  They share that they “examined the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating coworking environments into the real estate portfolios of large organizations. . . . The findings show that improved adaptability is the greatest advantage of external coworking solutions (facility management perspective). The most significant advantage of internal coworking is related to stimulation of innovation, creativity and knowledge sharing (general management perspective).

Song, Kowalewski, and Friedman studied human beings’ preference for musical harmony.  They determined that they “examined the association between PfH [preference for harmony] and two behavioral measures of the preference for familiarity, one based on individual differences in the strength of the mere-exposure effect and the other based on preferences for musical chords that appear more versus less frequently within Western musical corpora. Our results showed modest but reliable positive correlations between PfH and both measures. . . . PfH . .

How can seeing different sorts of art influence viewer creativity? Heruti and Mashal endeavor to answer this question.  They “examined whether creative thinking improves by utilizing an intervention program based on three types of ambiguous image-text interactions within artwork: (1) ambiguous text, (2) negation, and (3) semantically unrelated image-text. . . . The metaphor generation test (MGT) and Tel-Aviv creative test (TACT) were given pre- and post-intervention.

Jamshidi, and Pati studied wayfinding and how design can make it less likely that people get lost. They determined that among their study participants “the environmental elements that contributed to wayfinding were landmarks, corridors, nodes, regions, stairs, central spaces, courtyards, entrances, connecting halls, voids, doors, interior windows, and outdoor views.”

Research continues into how languages communicate information about colors seen.  Malik-Moraleda, Mahowald, and Conway learned that “Languages spoken in industrialized nations such as the United States, for example, tend to have about a dozen basic color terms, while languages spoken by more isolated populations often have fewer. . . .

Research recently completed by investigators at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience indicates how “realistic” our interactions with the world around us actually are.  Qin, Michon, Keysers, and Gazzola found that “if we observe actions in . . . meaningful sequences, our brains increasingly ignore what comes into our eyes, and depend more on predictions of what should happen next, derived from our own motor system. ‘What we would do next, becomes what our brain sees’, summarizes Christian Keysers. . . .

Sweeney, Frow, Payne, and McColl-Kennedy investigated how hospital design influences the wellbeing of both patients and health care professionals.  They report that “The hospital servicescape had a greater impact on physical, psychological and existential well-being for professionals than for patients. However, the reverse was true for satisfaction. The new servicescape enhanced the satisfaction and physical and psychological well-being of professionals but only the satisfaction of customers.

Yang, Sedikides, Wang, and Cai tie experiencing nature and feeling more authentic as a person.  As the researchers detail, they “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 . . .

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) continues to receive a great deal of attention from researchers.  Lohaus, Thoma, and Bellingrath report in a literature review published in Psychology of Consciousness:  Theory, Research, and Practice that found that ASMR “is associated with short-term positive effects on mental health. . . .