Tranquility - Tranquillity Research

Tranquillity Research

Natural settings that effortlessly engage our attention are typically associated with soft fascination and with the analysis of tranquillity and preference published by Herzog and Bosely (1992). In this study, the authors attempted to distinguish empirically between the constructs of tranquillity and preference as affective qualities of natural environments. Motivated by ART, from which they took tranquillity as a reasonable term to describe soft fascination, they produced definitions for each component. Tranquillity they defined as “how much you think this setting is a quiet, peaceful place, a good place to get away from everyday life”, and preference as “how much you like this setting for whatever reason”. Subjects were asked to score the following visual settings: mountains, deserts, fields / forests and waterscapes against the two target variables, tranquillity and preference, and four descriptor variables: mistiness, unstructured openness, focus and surface calmness. Tranquillity and preference were positively correlated across all settings with tranquillity scoring higher ratings in the field / forest, waterscape and mountain categories, whilst rushing water had the highest rating in the preference category. Analysis of the results identified three physical features that help explain the apparent split between tranquillity and preference. These were; mistiness, unstructured openness; which refers to how open the scene is and how difficult it is to establish a sense of depth or distance, and surface calmness. Mistiness and unstructured openness tended to depress preference relative to tranquillity whilst surface calmness tended to enhance it. Herzog and Barnes conducted a follow up study in which deserts and waterscapes were included in the setting types. In 2000, Herzog and Chernick conducted further research into the tranquillity construct when they investigated the relationship between tranquillity and danger in urban and rural settings. The key results that emerged from this research were that ‘setting care’, which relates to how safe we feel in a particular setting, is more salient for judgments of danger in urban settings than natural ones and that openness was a significant predictor of danger but not of tranquillity. The authors concluded therefore that tranquillity and danger should not simply be viewed as polar opposites, but like preference and tranquillity as distinct constructs.