A STUDY ON EVALUATION OF JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THERMAL ENVIRONMENT BY WORD-CHOICE METHOD WITH A UNIPOLAR SCALE

要旨

In order to measure the human psychological responses in detail to thermal stimuli and to evaluate thermal environment based on the responses, a word-choice method with a unipolar scale was proposed. Experiments were conducted in summer under various air temperature combinations (18, 22, 26, 29, 33℃) and relative humidities (50, 80%). Japanese sixteen healthy (8 females, 8 males) students were exposed to the experimental condition for 60 minutes in the climate chamber. The subjects were asked their psychological state using both the word-choice method with a unipolar scale and the conventional rating-scale method. As a result, Japanese are used to using atatakai (warm) and suzushii (cool) as adjectives indicating not only the degree of thermal sensation but also as expressions of comfortable state different from atui (hot) and samui (cold), respectively. Based on the new method, SET indicating thermal neutrality was found to be 27.1℃. The word-choice method with a unipolar scale can indicate thermal sensation and comfort as well as the conventional rating-scale method. Although it was difficult to distinguish between thermal neutral, thermal comfort and pleasantness using the conventional rating-scale method, the proposed method was able to indicate subtle psychological distinction regarding thermal environment.

主題