How Your City's Streets Affect Your Mental Health

Architecture impacts your mood more than you may think.

Do you feel your mood shift when you leave home in the morning? Maybe you're dreading work or school, but new research suggests that something as simple as the architecture around you can greatly affect your mood.

Colin Ellard, the director at the Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, explained to HuffPost Live on Wednesday how an eyesore of a building can be more than just aesthetically displeasing.

"If you compare people's responses to curves in architecture with the responses to more angular, jagged architectures, you can actually light up an easily measurable response that trails right down to people's brain states when they're confronted with those different kinds of architectures," Ellard said.

Ellard further elaborated on how this affects our state of mind in everyday situations.

"You have to think about what's most available to the pedestrian at street level, which is about the bottom 10 feet of the facade," Ellard told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. "When that's blank, when that doesn't have anything to attract the eye, has no features at all, then that is going to ... change people's emotional states. I'm not sure if I would go as far as to say it would depress them, but it would certainly put them into a more negative state."

Watch Ellard discuss how architecture plays a role in our mental state's everyday in the video above, and click here for the full segment on creating well-being through urban design.

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