Psychological attributes of house facades: A graph network approach in environmental psychology

The interaction between humans and their living environments is of ubiquitous nature, however the relationship between environmental psychology and cognitive neuropsychology has scarcely been explored. Environmental psychology has approached the human-environment relation through psychological concepts such as affordance, attachment, identity, safety, or aesthetic preference. Cognitive neuropsychology, on the other hand, frequently uses houses as stimuli in object- and face-processing research. This study combines concepts from the two disciplines (cognitive neuropsychology and environmental psychology) to explore the interrelation between the architecture of living environments, human cognition and emotion. Using network analysis, we aimed to examine the underlying relationship between self-reported psychological attributes, and to explore the role of differences between three countries in appraisals of house facades. To that end, we used 50 images of house facades selected from a well-controlled data set of Canadian houses (DalHouses). 305 participants from Denmark, Germany, and Canada rated the houses on 12 psychological attribute dimensions. Results showed the highest strength for the nodes “friendliness”, “likability”, “invitingness”, “safety”, and “freedom”, while “typicality” and “familiarity” were unexpectedly low in strength. In terms of cultural differences, the three countries diverged in some correlations, e.g. facelikeness and loneliness, loneliness and freedom, but not in others, e.g. typicality and safety. Similar to the DalHouses study, "facelikeness" was not correlated with “typicality” nor with “liking”. Taken together, the present results identify psychological attributes that cluster together and could be particularly important in the characterization of house facades on a universal level, but also specific to different cultural and geographical backgrounds.