Introducing ATLAS: A Visual Stimuli Database for Studying the Affective Experience of Architectural Atmospheres

Atmosphere, as the affective character of a space, shapes our conscious and nonconscious emotional experiences. Growing interest in this phenomenon has led to interdisciplinary approaches that integrate phenomenological first-person evaluations with neuroscientific third-person measures. However, studying the emotional effects of architectural atmospheres in behavioral and (neuro)physiological experiments requires affect-based stimuli specifically designed for spatial contexts — resources currently lacking. To address this gap, we developed ATLAS (Database of Visual Atmospheric Stimuli), a collection of sixty-six spatial patterns derived from thirteen generators of atmosphere (e.g., colors, materials, textures, lights, and proportions), structured to elicit a broad spectrum of arousal and valence states from a controlled baseline corridor. ATLAS aims to become an open-access tool built to support scholars in exploring emotional responses to architectural features. This paper outlines the conceptual framework, design methodology, and future applications of ATLAS, emphasizing architecture’s role in emotion research through its expertise in atmospheric design, spatial representation, and graphic processing.