Liu, Yin and Liang, in research relevant to art selection and other design decisions, have learned that we prefer to see things clearly. They investigated “a potential association between clarity (i.e., operationalized as visual resolution) and affect [emotion] in human cognition…providing support for the ideas of embodied cognition as well as implications for our preference for clarity and aversion to blur…the present findings provide important implications for the evaluative judgments in daily life. The reason why we prefer HD screens and dislike the blurry view on smoggy days is normally regarded as our preference for more visual details. Here in our research, the findings suggest that these phenomena may partly be the consequences of an automatic tendency to view blurrier objects as worse.”
Yiguang Liu, Jun Yin, and Junying Liang. 2019. “Why Smoggy Days Suppress Our Mood: Automatic Association Between Clarity and Valence.” Frontiers in Psychology,https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01580
Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.