Using the embodied language of space to develop stress assessment tool for architectural experience

Despite the growing amount of evidence unequivocally indicating that architecture affects people’s psychosomatic health and behavior, it remains unclear how the neurophysiological reaction is linked to the aesthetic (conscious) experience of an architectural space. Following up on previous experimental studies by Fich et al. which showed that features of the spatial setting - presence or absence of openings in the room - influence participants’ physiological stress reaction (measured as cortisol levels) [1] and the enactive cognition framework [2–6], we hypothesize that the aesthetic experience of architecture is an anticipatory process of making sense of a situation at hand and hence, at least partially a kind of a risk assessment process which might predict the physiological stress reaction in a given space.
In parallel, a rich body of work within the fields of cognitive linguistics, semantics, and neuroscience on “embodied language” emphasizes the intrinsic connection between linguistic meaning and range of experiences (sensorimotor, affective, social), in which architecture and more generally, built environment, could act as a scaffolding in language acquisition and understanding of semantic meanings. Therefore, by building upon this well-established link between linguistic meaning and embodied experience [7–10] on the one hand, and the Semantic Environment Description (SED) questionnaire developed by architectural psychologists in 1970s in Sweden [11] on the other, we explore how the space-body-language relationship can be used together with physiological measurements to develop an assessment tool to describe and capture people’s aesthetic experiences of spaces and their anticipated stress reaction. Experimental testing of our hypothesis and related questionnaire development is currently underway.
The advantages of the tool are twofold: 1) first, by using the power of language and semantic meanings as being grounded in our bodily and spatial experiences it allows for a well-targeted approximation of people’s aesthetic judgements of architectural spaces; and 2) secondly, it addresses the need for developing methodological tools specifically aimed towards scientific exploration of architectural questions, which should facilitate the information exchange and usability of research results in architectural design. Accordingly, this research is inspired by a larger framework for developing neurophenomenological approach for examining architectural experience (following [12]), which unites the strengths of cognitive neuroscience, environmental psychology, philosophy of the mind/phenomenology, and architecture to understand the human being as architectural experiential subject in its phenomenal and biological totality.