Space, color, and perceived qualities of indoor environments

When relating productivity measures to qualities of indoor environments, emotional concepts play an important role as intermediating variables (e.g., arousal in the classic Yerkes-Dodson law or workplace satisfaction). While several studies have analyzed influences of individual aspects of the physical environment, little is known about the interplay of multiple factors. Therefore the presented internet-based study exemplarily addressed both individual and interactive effects of room colors and primary spatial properties on affective responses to the presented environments. A comparison between affective appraisals and quantitative scene descriptions found strong correlations for all rating categories (overall explained variance.43<R<.86). In seven of eight rating categories a simple super-imposition of factors appeared to be the most plausible model when comparing the integrative experiment to corresponding single factor studies. Yet also the detected differences appear meaningful, suggesting that reliable real world predictions require a proper operationalization of baseline levels and context