How Does Lighting Affect Your Mood

How Does Lighting Affect Your Mood

Preview

Imagine this, when walking through a dark and narrow alley, with no lighting to guide you through or show you anything around, what will you feel? Are you scared? or worried? Will someone pops up out of blue with a gun or knife? Whilst, imagine this, you are walking through a bright and cheerful alley, with enough lighting resources to show you the details of every corner, are you still scared?

That is how the lighting affects our mood. When we are in super dark surroundings, the light will make us feel unsecured. When having enough light resources to light up the space, our mood will shift to a relaxed mode. That is the lighting but usually is ignored by us.

Before we go further to discuss the effects of lighting on our mood, we first need to understand what changes the intensity of lights.

Illumination

Illumination is a physical quantity that expresses the brightness of the illuminated surface. The illuminance of a point on a surface is defined as the ratio of the luminous flux incident on the surfel at this point to the area of the surfel. Numerically, it is equal to the luminous flux projected on a unit area.

The difference in illuminance can also be felt in our daily life. It is also a warm yellow light, but the light of the bathroom heat lamp is more dazzling to the human eye than the bedroom lighting, and looking directly will make people feel dizzy.

The height of lamps and lampshades

The height of lamps and lampshades are the most important elements that affect the illumination of light. When the height of lamps is high enough to be away from the human being, the illumination from the lamp will be more gentle and friendly. On the other hand, when the height of lamps is too close to the human being, people will feel stressed by lighting. Hence, influence the mood. When it comes to lampshades, the lampshades are a useful method for working as the media between lighting and human being. If the lamps are covered with lampshades, the light will radiate less direct lighting to people. Hence, the lighting received by people will be less aggressive.

According to researchers at the Scarborough campus in Toronto, Canada, whether human emotions are positive or negative, the brighter the light, the more intensified the emotions. Bright light intensifies our initial emotional responses to different stimuli, including people and objects, the researchers said. Therefore, bright lighting environments such as general offices and conference halls can make people more concentrated and devoted to work.

It is not only the intensity of the light that affects people's emotions, but also the contrast of the angle. The most typical example is reflected in the lighting of the film. The combination of different intensities, different angles, and different color temperatures of the lights, can create emotions and visual effects of fear and sadness, or happiness and joy, which further enhances the atmosphere of the film and infects the emotions of the audience.

lighting changes mood

 

Lighting on mood

Most people have corresponding requirements for the temperature of the light, which changes with the seasons. People prefer warm colors in winter, and warm colors in summer. By using different lights, people's perception of temperature can be changed. In addition, women's negative emotions are weakened under warm light, and conversely, they are strengthened under cool white light. Men, on the other hand, performed more smoothly in both environments. Women's negative emotions diminished under high-intensity lights, while men's negative emotions increased.

For artificial light source lighting, when the ambient temperature is different, the visual comfort of the work surface is the same, but the eyes feel different in the bright environment. With the same light source and illuminance, it feels dark when the ambient temperature is high (27°C) and bright when the temperature is low (20.5°C). This sensitivity is not found in natural light sources. The reason is that there are many interference factors of natural light sources, such as weather conditions, the landscape outside the window, and the impact of natural and environmental changes on people.

With the continuous improvement of people's taste for the indoor environment, on the premise of satisfying basic illuminance and creating good lighting art, we should also fully consider the different effects of different lighting environments on people's physiology and psychology, cultural differences, etc. Design lighting for specific issues to create a vivid and humane lighting environment.


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