Adaptation to Physiological and Psychological Environmental Stressors

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Marcel Schweiker; Professor Dr.-Ing. Christoph van Treeck
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems ; Construction Material Sciences, Chemistry, Building Physics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552253510

As people spend up to 90% of their daily time indoors, they are susceptible to a myriad of indoor environmental influences, often considered as stressors. Considering workplaces, which are the target environments of this proposal, the first set of stressors arises from the mere fact of being inside, and the difficulties that arise in trying to achieve satisfactory conditions with fresh air, proper lighting, and a comfortable air temperature and humidity within the room. The design of interior spaces including their spatial, atmospheric, and indoor environmental quality and opportunities for occupants to interact with the architecture and building are core tasks for interdisciplinary teams of architects, interior designers and engineers. In addition to these building-related mainly physical stressors, common stressors at workplaces are time pressure and emotional stress, which are associated with a work task, or psychosocial stressors, when interacting or sharing spaces with others. While individual stressors and their effects on human thermal perception have been identified and quantified, there is a lack of knowledge and quantification on combined effects of physical, architectural and psychological stressors on short- and long-term perception processes as well as their potentials for improving occupants’ satisfaction. This project aims at identifying prototypes for human physiological and psychological stress perception and response in indoor environments and how adaptation to these stressors can be explained. Applying a combination of field-based surveys and laboratory studies, current models of thermal comfort, its prediction as well as existing literature on responses to and coping with environmental stress in buildings will be improved. A multi-level approach will integrate the physiological and psychological characteristics of persons, helping to improve the predictability of wellbeing in indoor environments at work and at home for building design and operation. The long-term objective of this project is to develop a methodology starting from the identification, description and explanation of individual and combined adaptive processes of thermal perception (physiological and psychological) towards their implementation in thermo-physiological comfort models, while enabling the consideration of office-like stressors of the physical environment (temperature, light, air quality, noise and architectural features) and work place stressors into a unique mathematical modelling framework for the prediction of human perception supporting building design and operation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants