Human's Psychological and Physiological Responses to Sound Environment

Dear Colleagues,

The multisensory stimuli of the environment that surround us significantly impact our perception, feelings, moods, cognitive performances, and behaviors. They evoke both physiological and psychological responses, which may affect physical and mental wellbeing in both the short and the long term. Psychological and physiological feedback may highlight the importance of different sensory stimuli on our wellbeing and help to understand cognitive and behavioral responses to the environment during everyday life.

Sound is one of the main factors affecting humans’ physiological and psychological responses. It significantly interacts with other environmental elements/factors and with a person’s activity, mental state, expectation, memory, personality, and cultural background.

The development of new tools and techniques, such as extended reality (XR), smart and wearable devices for physiological and environmental monitoring, and machine learning techniques, has increased interest in understanding the complex connections between the sound environment and humans’ responses in the fields of the environmental acoustics, noise at work, building and room acoustics, as well as of soundscape.

This Special Issue encourages the submission of original works of laboratory and field studies, applied methodologies and techniques, critical perspectives, and reviews in psychological and physiological responses to a sound environment.

It focuses but is not limited to the following subjects:

• Emotional and mental state in the sound environment;
• Cognitive responses to sound environment;
• Human restoration and quiet environment;
• Effects of sound on performances in work environment;
• Physiological measurements in the noisy and quiet environment;
• Wearable environmental monitoring;
• Machine learning and advanced statistical techniques;
• Psychophysiological datasets on the sound and multisensory environment;
• Human's responses in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiments.

Dr. Massimiliano Masullo
Prof. Dr. Lei Yu
Dr. Ming Yang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Acoustics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.