A novel data-driven model for the effect of mood state on thermal sensation

Abstract

Thermal comfort has an important role in human life, considering that people spend most of their lives in indoor environments. However, the necessity of ensuring the thermal comfort of these people presents an important problem, calculating the thermal comfort accurately. The assessment of thermal comfort has always been problematic, from past to present, and the studies conducted in this field have indicated that there is a gap between thermal comfort and thermal sensation. Although recent studies have shown an effort to take human psychology into account more extensively, these studies just focused on the physiological responses of the human body under psychological disturbances. On the other hand, the mood state of people is one of the most significant parameters of human psychology. Thus, this paper investigated the effect of occupants' mood states on thermal sensation; furthermore, it introduced a novel Mood State Correction Factor (MSCF) to the existing thermal comfort model. To this aim, experiments were conducted at a mixed-mode building in a university between 15 August 2021 and 15 August 2022. Actual Mean Vote (AMV) and Profile of Mood States (POMS) were used to examine the effect of mood state on thermal sensation. The outcomes of this study showed that in the mood states of very pessimistic and very optimistic, the occupants felt warmer than the calculated one and the MSCFs are calculated as -0.125 and -0.114 for the very pessimistic and very optimistic mood states, respectively. It is worth our time to note that the experiments in this study were conducted during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic and the results of this study could differ in different cultural backgrounds.