No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate With Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol

What the study found

Words about clutter and unfinished projects in spouses' home tours formed a 'stressful home' score; restful and nature words formed a 'restorative home' score. Over the next three weekdays, wives with higher stressful-home scores had flatter diurnal cortisol slopes and rising depressed mood, while wives with higher restorative-home scores had steeper slopes and falling depressed mood. Results held after controlling for marital satisfaction and neuroticism.

Limitations

Measures how people describe their homes, not the homes themselves. Correlational. The reported effects are for wives; small sample.

Neurodesign interpretation

The clearest link found so far between the experience of one's own home and the daily cortisol rhythm. The variable is perception, so it says little about which physical features matter.

Possible design implications

Hypothesis: how restful or unfinished a home feels to its occupant may track daily stress physiology.

Study design

Linguistic analysis of self-guided home tours, then cortisol and mood sampling over three weekdays

Population

Dual-income married spouses. Sample: 60.

Setting

Family homes, USA

Field

Environmental psychology, Housing

Mechanism

HPA axis (diurnal cortisol), mood

Spatial variable

Perceived home environment (clutter, unfinished, restful words)

Keywords

home, cortisol, diurnal slope, clutter, mood

Notes and follow-up

Related records: ND-0147, ND-0158. Published online 2009; print issue 2010.