Lighting to Make You Feel Better: Improving the Mood of Elderly People with Affective Ambiences

Abstract

Current lighting technologies extend the options for changing the appearance of rooms and closed spaces, as such creating ambiences with an affective meaning. Using intelligence, these ambiences may instantly be adapted to the needs of the room's occupant(s), possibly improving their well-being. We hypothesized that ambiences with a clearly recognizable, positive affective meaning could be used to effectively mitigate negative mood in elderly. After inducing a sad mood with a short movie one group of elderly was immersed in a positive high arousing (i.e., activating) ambience, and another group in a neutral ambience. Similarly, after inducing anxiety with a short movie one group of elderly was immersed in a pleasant low arousing (i.e., cozy) ambience, and another group in a neutral ambience. We monitored the evolution of the mood of the four groups of elderly over a period of ten minutes after the mood induction, with both self-reported mood measurements (every 2 minutes) and constant measurements of the skin conductance response (SCR) and electrocardiography (ECG). In line with our hypothesis we found that the activating ambience was physiologically more arousing than the neutral ambience. The cozy ambience was more effective in calming anxious elderly than the neutral ambience, as reflected by both the self-reported and physiological measurements.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: BdR is an employee of Philips Research, whose company partly funded this study through the ACE project. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Figures

Fig 1. Schematic representation of the hypotheses formulated in this study.

(H1) an activating ambience is more effective in increasing both pleasure and arousal in elderly that are in a sad mood than a neutral ambience, and (H2) a cozy ambience is more effective in both increasing pleasure and reducing arousal in elderly that are in an anxious mood than a neutral ambience.

Fig 2. An overview of the installed luminaires in the experimental room.

Fig 3. An impression of the activating ambience (left) and cozy ambience (right).

Fig 4. Average pleasure and arousal scores before and after the sad movie (left) and anxious movie (right).

The different bars represent the different ambience groups. The error bars reflect the 95% CI.

Fig 5. Average change scores with the error bars reflecting the 95% CI for pleasure (left) and arousal (right) after the sad mood induction.

The different bars represent the ambience to which the participants were exposed.

Fig 6. Average change scores with the error bars reflecting the 95% CI for SCR (left) and HR (right) after the sad mood induction.

The different bars represent the ambience to which participants were exposed.

Fig 7. Average change scores with the error bars reflecting the 95% CI for pleasure (left) and arousal (right) after the anxious mood induction.

The different bars represent the different ambiences in which participants were immersed.

Fig 8. Average arousal change scores (also averaged over time), showing also the 95% CI as error bars, after the anxious mood induction for the male and female participants separately.

The different bars represent the different ambiences in which participants were immersed.

Fig 9. Average change scores, including the 95% CI as error bars, for SCR (a) and HR (b) after the anxious mood induction.

The different bars represent the different ambiences in which participants were immersed.