The Effects of White versus Coloured Light in Waiting Rooms on People’s Emotions

Abstract

Lighting ambience in architecture is one of the important factors affecting the emotions of people, and the study of the psychological needs of architectural lighting may provide more rational guidelines for architectural design. There are many previous studies on the emotional impact of lighting in architecture, but most of them use a dimensional model of emotion to analyse emotions, which is difficult for the reader to understand. In this study, we used the dimensional model of emotion to analyse emotions and converted it into easily understood basic emotions through the PAD model. Participants (n = 32) were divided into three groups and subjected to three scenes with different colour combinations. The analysis showed that the arousal and dominance of the participants were significantly affected from white to coloured light. No effect on comfort was observed between white and coloured light. Our study suggests that the use of coloured lighting instead of white lights in a non-clinic windowless waiting room may not improve negative mood.