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CrowdScience: How do buildings affect our mood?

Discussion & Talk

19/07/2024 GMT

How do buildings affect our mood?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, How do buildings affect our mood?

Why do some buildings make us feel emotions like fear and sadness?

Buildings inspire many emotions like awe, serenity or even dread. CrowdScience listener Siobhan was struck by this as she passed a huge apartment block with tiny windows; it reminded her of a prison. So she asked us to investigate the feelings that buildings can trigger.

Architects have long considered how buildings might make occupants or passersby feel: asking whether certain features elicit feelings of wonder or joy... or sadness and fear. And now a young field of neuroscience is starting to interrogate these very questions, too.

How much of the way we feel about a building is to do with its intrinsic design, and how much is due to our individual brain chemistry and life experiences? Presenter Caroline Steel explores such questions with leading experts - and gets electrodes stuck to her head in an attempt to measure her emotional response to built environments.

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How do buildings affect our mood?

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