Browsing by Subject "Wood"

Wooden buildings are known to act as carbon storage, with the wood materials also showing promise in being able to improve the well-being of humans by virtue of their visual appearance, tactile feeling, and the scents they emit into the air. As the many benefits of wood are driving the world to increase the amount of wood construction, it is necessary to gather up-to-date, research-based evidence on what this increase in wood use means for the people living, studying, and working in these wooden buildings. In this study, the psychological effects of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) wood material scent, virtually created wooden walls and the combination of the two, were studied on 50 participants in a room imitating a small classroom. Each participant visited a control setting and one or two subsequent settings (with wood scent or with virtual wooden walls, and with both). On each visit, the participants performed a cognitive test and answered a psychological questionnaire three times (at the beginning in a separate meeting room, after entering the testing room, and after performing the cognitive test). The data from different settings was compared to the control setting primarily with the paired samples t-test, with the psychological questionnaire data being normalized to the values of the first psychological questionnaire for each visit. The results of this study found that the virtual wooden wall setting had a statistically significant decrease in stress and improvement in mood in the participants in comparison to the control setting. The wood scent setting was not found to have statistically significant differences to the control setting, in fact having some very slight indication of worsened stress and mood levels. The combination setting showed indications of a slight decrease in stress and improvement in mood, but again, not to a statistically significant degree. The cognitive test results also showed a slight indication that the virtual wooden wall setting may have improved the test scores slightly. The effect on the other settings’ test scores and the cognitive test response speed results for all settings were inconclusive.