Huebner, Gesche M; Shipworth, David; (2017) Emotions and thermal comfort – feeling warmer when feeling happier. Presented at: International Conference of Environmental Psychology (ICEP) 2017, A Coruña, Spain.

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Abstract

Providing thermal comfort (TC) in buildings typically uses around 30% of developed nations’ energy and carbon emissions. Thermal comfort is provided by constraining ambient temperatures to within narrowly defined ‘comfortable’ ranges traditionally based on physiological heat balance models of the human body. Our understanding of what drives thermal comfort perception is still limited however, and while physiological parameters have been identified for decades, research on psychological parameters of comfort is still rather limited. The basic emotions have not been studied in relationship to thermal comfort, so in this study, we investigated the relationship between emotional state, i.e. feeling happy or sad, and thermal comfort perception. A recent study has shown that the various basic emotions are associated with specific perceived activation state of the body (Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, & Hietanen, 2014) which we hypothesized would translate in different comfort states. Feeling happy would, through higher perceived bodily activation, translate to feeling warmer or more thermally comfortable - whereas feeling sad would lead to feeling colder or less thermally comfortable, because of the associated perceived lower bodily activation. We designed an experimental study using Amazon Mechanical Turk (Paolacci, Chandler, & Ipeirotis, 2010). N = 300 Turkers were recruited and randomly assigned to recall either a happy autobiographical episode or a sad one to induce a happy or sad emotional state (Briñol, Petty, & Barden, 2007). The valid sample encompassed N = 273. A manipulation check revealed that the emotional manipulation worked. There was a significant effect of emotional state on the standard ASHRAE comfort survey question “How are you feeling in this moment from 1 (cold) to 7 (hot)?”. Those feeling happy reported feeling significantly warmer than those feeling sad [t(269) = 3.66, p < .001]. However, there was no difference in the two other outcomes variables, estimate of room temperature and rating of how thermally comfortable one felt - the latter also being a standard thermal comfort survey question. We conclude that there is some evidence for a relationship between emotional state and thermal perception in feeling of warm or cold that warrants further research on this topic. The data also indicate a dissociation between various thermal comfort related outcomes measures, posing a methodological challenge that needs addressing.

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