NY-87-08-4 -- Thermal Comfort: A New Approach for Subjective Evaluation PDF

A scaling procedure for evaluating the human thermal response is presented. This technique represents a new approach to measuring affective qualities and avoids the use of bipolar (opposite) adjective-pairs that have been commonly associated with scales employed in this research area. This procedure was tested in conjunction with a traditional thermal comfort (TC) bipolar adjective-pair scale. From the development process two separate rating scales were generated, thermal dissatisfaction (Tdis) and thermal satisfaction (Tsat). The correlations between the scales were TC vs. Tsat, .701; TC vs. Tdis, -.663; and Tsat vs. Tdis, -.672. These findings suggest that the Tsat and Tdis scales do not measure the subjective response in the same way as the traditional TC ballot. Under controlled experimental conditions thermal dissatisfaction emerged as a separate and possibly more sensitive measure than either thermal satisfaction or thermal comfort. It is recommended that future investigations incorporate the use of both measurement techniques and that research be directed toward quantifying the distinction between maximizing thermal comfort and minimizing thermal dissatisfaction.

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