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Neuroarchitecture is a new interdisciplinary research field combining neuroscience and architecture that has developed and expanded since 2000. Neuroarchitecture originated from the divergence of previous multidisciplinary studies on the relationship between humans and the environment. However, scoping reviews of neuroarchitecture in relation to the experience of the built environment are lacking. Thus, this study aimed to provide the background and research trends of neuroarchitecture to contribute to discussions on the built environment.

A general form of scoping review was adopted, following the PRISMA-ScR checklist. For this scoping review emphasizing the embodied implication of neuroarchitecture for the built environment, an evaluation framework was developed consisting of four categories: health, performance, aesthetics and emotion.

This study explores objective techniques, including electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrocardiogram, electrodermal activity and saliva cortisol, to measure neurophysiological impacts, adopting real, virtual and images of environmental settings. An in-depth review of 25 selected papers revealed the existing empirical research on neuroarchitecture using human physiological measurement tools and representational environment settings to examine the impact of human–environment relationships.

A meta-analysis of theoretical and intervention studies on neuroarchitecture that investigates the multisensory characteristics of the environment is lacking. In addition, the development and application of wearable tools to meet the needs of real environment settings can improve the effectiveness of neurophysiological measurement tools.

Architectural history is the fundamental resource that informs the essence of architecture and design thinking; however, education does not appear to link history to design thinking. A study of architectural history textbooks reveals the inadequacy of relying on the modern paradigm and architecture's typology of styles and periods. Instead, conceptual metaphor theory is recommended as the framework for understanding architectural history from an experiential approach. This study aims to complement architectural history by a new understanding of embodied cognition in generating paradigm change.

This study reviewed architectural history through changing body metaphors in terms of embodied experience. The study examined three different metaphorical structures of the body – nature, machine and neural network – projected on the built environment and experienced in accordance with three periods of architectural history, which are categorized as before modern, modern and after modern.

As a result of the case study, ancient pyramids can attain more empirical meaning as playful spaces than abstract forms, Greek temples as social spaces than symbolic spaces, medieval churches as atmospheric spaces than visually-centric spaces, modern residential buildings as unsustainable machines and contemporary parks as raising awareness of sustainable environment.

Therefore, this article contributes to understandings and knowledge of how built environments are experienced from the perspective of a neural network, to the development of a pedagogical alternative to traditional architectural history, to linking architectural history to design and practice to re-establish the importance and vitality of architectural history and finally to creating a sustainable didactic.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

This study aims to investigate the neurocognitive status of people with different moods (depressed and non-depressed) both in a typical urban environment (TUE) and in an urban green environment (UGE).

The study was conducted with the participation of 210 individuals in a real environment. Heart rates of the participants were measured together with EEG and eye-tracking measurements while they were walking in a real urban environment (TUE and UGE). The participants were divided into depressed and non-depressed groups according to different moods. Movements within the city based on these two distinctions and different cognitive moods were investigated, together with the effects of the city plan on these people.

As a result, the green urban fabric was found to have a positive effect even on people with depression. Yet, it was found that the non-depressed group also spent more time in a green urban environment.

The study shows that urban planners and designers should assume an important role in the design of green spaces, which have a more intense visual and cognitive impact than structures.

This chapter explores a common, but typically overlooked urban practice: smoking outside the workplace. This activity is analysed as an attempt to create marginal spaces of brief retreat from the acceleration and agitation of the workplace. By talking to smokers about what drives them into the street, and capturing smokers photographically, we discover that these people are seeking moments of breakaway from the dominating involvement of the commercial city. The practices we observe in this chapter are typical of what Erving Goffman refers to as ‘away’ activities: strategies for briefly escaping from the absorption of all-consuming social situations. We conclude by asking whether these urban pauses could be stretched to a point where they challenge the compulsion of the overwrought rhythmic order of the capitalist city.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the behavioural and psychological effects on people with intellectual disabilities of transferring to an environment influenced by patient choice and low secure standards.

Patients and staff transferring from a non-optimal environment to one driven by low secure standards compared the homeliness, ward climate and satisfaction with the two wards. Comparisons were made between the occurrences of risk behaviours on the two wards.

The new environment was rated by staff as more homely while patients’ increased satisfaction with the new ward was reflected in social climate ratings of patient cohesion and experienced safety. The latter findings were reinforced by an objective reduction in risk behaviours in the new environment.

Treatment interventions need to optimise research findings that attest to the influence of the environment on the behaviour of patients with intellectual disabilities.

Findings highlight need to increase the focus on aspects of the built environment in planning the treatment of women in secure care.

By a thorough bibliometric examination of the area through time, this paper analyses the research landscape of metaverse in education. It is an effort that is focused on the metaverse research trends, academic production and conceptual focus of scientific publications.

The Web of Science (WoS) database was explored for information containing research articles and associated publications that met the requirements. For a thorough analysis of the trend, thematic focus and scientific output in the subject of metaverse in education, a bibliometric technique was used to analyse the data. The bibliometrix package of R software, specifically the biblioshiny interface of R-studio, was used to conduct the analysis.

The analysis of the metaverse in education spanning from 1995 to the beginning of 2023 reveals a dynamic and evolving landscape. Notably, the field has experienced robust annual growth, with a peak of publications in 2022. Citation analysis highlights seminal works, with Dionisio et al. (2013) leading discussions on the transition of virtual worlds into intricate digital cultures. Thematic mapping identifies dominant themes such as “system,” “augmented reality” and “information technology,” indicating a strong technological focus. Surprisingly, China emerges as a leading contributor with significant citation impact, emphasising the global nature of metaverse research. The thematic map suggests ongoing developments in performance and future aspects, emphasising the essential role of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Overall, the findings depict a vibrant and multidimensional metaverse in education, poised for continued exploration and innovation.

The study is among the pioneers that provide a comprehensive bibliometric analysis in the area of metaverse in education which will guide the novice researchers to identify the unexplored areas.

The present study investigates human behavioral and emotional experiences based on human-built environment interaction with a specific interest in urban graffiti displaying fear and pleasure-inducing facial expressions. Regarding human behavioral and emotional experience, two questions are asked for the outcome of human responses and two hypotheses are formulated. H1 is based on the behavioral experience and posits that the urban graffiti displaying fear and pleasure-inducing facial expressions elicit specified behavioral fear and pleasure responses. H2 is based on emotional experience and states that the urban graffiti displaying fear and pleasure-inducing facial expressions elicit specified emotional fear and pleasure responses.

The research design is developed as a multi-method approach, applying a lab-based experimental strategy (N:39). The research equipment includes a mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) and a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. The behavioral and emotional human responses concerning the representational features of urban graffiti are assessed objectively by measuring physiological variables, EEG signals and subjectively by behavioral variables, systematic behavioral observation and self-report variables, Self-assessment Manikin (SAM) questionnaire. Additionally, correlational analyses between behavioral and emotional results are performed.

The findings of behavioral and emotional evaluations and correlational results show that specialized fear and pleasure response patterns occur due to the affective characteristics of the urban graffiti's representational features, supporting our hypotheses. As a result, the characteristics of behavioral fear and pleasure response and emotional fear and pleasure response are identified.

The present paper contributes to the literature on human-built environment interactions by using physiological, behavioral and self-report measurements as indicators of human behavioral and emotional experiences. Additionally, the literature on urban graffiti is expanded by studying the representational features of urban graffiti as a parameter of investigating human experience in the built environment.

Atmospherics is undoubtedly a multi-sensory concept, despite mostly being studied on a sense-by-sense basis by architects, sensory marketers and urban designers alike. That is, our experience is nearly always the result of cross-modal/multi-sensory interactions between what we see, hear, smell and feel in a given space. As such, it is critical that researchers study the senses in concert. That said, the few empirical studies that have attempted to assess the impact of deliberately combining the senses in a retail/health-care environment have typically failed to deliver the multi-sensory boost to experience (or sales) that the multi-sensory science predicts ought to be observed. Invoking notions of processing fluency, sensory overload and sensory (in-) congruency in the field of multi-sensory atmospherics may help to explain what happened (or went wrong) in such cases.

Critical review of literature on atmospherics and sensory marketing, highlighting various difficulties of interpretation and challenges to accepted conclusions.

Atmospherics is a fundamentally multi-sensory concept, and cross-modal interactions are the rule, not the exception. As such, researchers need to study atmospherics in a multi-sensory context.

This critical commentary highlights the need for researchers to consider atmospherics from a multi-sensory, rather than sense-by-sense perspective.

The paper aims to explain the limitations of existing cognitive architectures and affective models, and propose a new cognitive-affective architecture that can be integrated in real intelligent agents to make them more realistic and believable.

The paper evaluates the state of the art, and describes the design and implementation of the cognitive-affective architecture in an agent. A brief evaluation of the agent is provided.

The paper clearly states that it is possible to use cognitive architectures to help, but there is a lack of architectures that address the problem of combining cognition and emotion in agents in a unified, simplified way. A cognitive-affective architecture is useful to make believable intelligent agents in an easier way.

The paper does not explore a lot of possible future work that can be done to extend the emotional expressions of the agent, as well as including direct emotional-sensing capabilities in real time.

The paper argues about the need to include cognitive-affective architectures in modern intelligent agents. The architecture allows to influence and modify the behavior of the agent in real time, to achieve a more realistic and believable interaction with the user.

The paper remarks the importance of a cognitive-affective architecture that makes intelligent agents able to help the users in different tasks and environments.

The paper describes a new cognitive-affective architecture and its utility for modern intelligent agents. This is proven by including it in a previous agent, which boosts its behavior and emotional expression possibilities and thus improves user experience.