Exploring Emotional and Neurophysiological Responses to Architectural Atmospheres

Abstract accepted at the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC 2024) "Segmentation and Binding in Spatial Cognition". Rome: September 9–13, 2024. Through the interplay of architecture, psychology, and physiology, we explored the priming potential of architectural atmospheres on our first impressions of space. Participants walked through four virtual reality iterations where a corridor connected an empty room to an exhibition space. The starting and ending rooms never changed, whereas the corridor’s light varied: dark, blue, amber, and bright. By integrating self-reports with physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance), we investigated whether and, if so, how the corridor’s atmosphere primed participants’ impressions of the subsequent room. Before the virtual-reality test, a 5-minute resting-state electroencephalogram recorded participants’ functional brain networks, and questionnaires analyzed their emotional intelligence, personality, and empathy traits. We expected correlations among individual characteristics, neurophysiological correlates, and atmospheric responsiveness (conscious and nonconscious).