Measuring arousal and valence generated by the dynamic experience of architectural forms in virtual environments

Abstract

The built environment represents the stage surrounding our everyday life activities. To investigate how architectural design impacts individuals' affective states, we measured subjective judgments of perceived valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal after the dynamic experience of a progressive change of macro visuospatial dimensions of virtual spaces. To this aim, we developed a parametric model that allowed us to create 54 virtual architectural designs characterized by a progressive change of sidewalls distance, ceiling and windows height, and color of the environment. Decreasing sidewalls distance, ceiling height variation, and increasing windows height significantly affected the participants' emotional state within virtual environments. Indeed, such architectural designs generated high arousing and unpleasant states according to subjective judgment. Overall, we observed that valence and arousal scores are affected by all the dynamic form factors which modulated the spaciousness of the surrounding. Showing that the dynamic experience of virtual environments enables the possibility of measuring the emotional impact of macro spatial architectural features, the present findings may lay the groundwork for future experiments investigating the effects that the architectural design has on individuals' mental state as a fundamental factor for the creation of future spaces.

Figure 1

(A) Perspectives of virtual environments for each architectural factor (SideWalls, Ceiling, Windows, Color) for the corresponding experimental conditions (decreasing, constant, increasing; cold, warm). (B) schematic representation of one experimental trial: subject made a virtual promenade between the first two nuclei of the architectural design (T0-T1) and then rated the experienced level of arousal and pleasantness (T2).

Figure 2

Distribution of the valence scores for SideWalls, Windows, Ceiling, and Color are presented in (A–D), respectively. Red lines represent the mean value; data are represented as dots laid over a 1.96 standard error mean (95% confidence interval) in pink and a 1 standard deviation in blue. Red asterisks indicate a significant main effect, and black lines show significant pairwise comparisons.

Figure 3

(A) distribution of the valence scores for the two-way interaction SideWalls × Ceiling. Yellow, green, and purple lines represent decreasing, constant, and increasing ceiling height. (B) distribution of the valence scores for the two-way interaction Ceiling × Windows. Yellow, green, and purple lines represent decreasing, constant, and increasing windows height. Data are presented with their mean value with vertical lines representing the 95% confidence interval. Black lines stand for significant pairwise comparison, while black asterisks remark an experimental condition that all comparisons with the other conditions are significant.

Figure 4

Distribution of arousal scores for the main factors SideWalls, Windows, Ceiling, and Color are presented in (A–D), respectively. Same color code as Fig. 2.

Figure 5

(A) distribution of the arousal scores for the two-way interaction Color × Ceiling. Blue and red lines represent cold and warm architectural designs, respectively. (B) Distribution of the arousal scores for the two-way interaction Windows x Ceiling, same color code as Fig. 3.

Figure 6

For each panel, the blue section of the plane includes the architectural designs belonging to the HANV cluster, while the white one comprises those designs within the LAPV cluster. (A–C) Yellow, green, and purple dots identify environments with decreasing, constant and increasing conditions for SideWalls, Windows, and Ceiling factors, respectively. (D) Blue and red dots identify architectural designs with cold and warm texture colors, respectively. The red asterisk indicates statistically significant results.