Thursday, May 10, 2007

Ceiling height influences your frame of mind

Sounds odd at first, but spend some time in a room with low ceilings, and a room with high ceilings. They do feel different.

"A recent study at the University of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain processing."Priming means a concept gets activated in a person's head," researcher Joan Meyers-Levy told LiveScience. "When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts."
In the study, they gave people problem solving tests, and product evaluation tests. Seem weird to me that there were such measureable differences between a 10 foot ceilin, and an 8 foot ceiling. Unfortunately, the article made no mention of sample size, or the degree of difference between the groups.

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