The Role of Expectation in Comfort Perception: The Mattresses’ Evaluation Experience

What are the new trends in research for comfort evaluation and the objective and predictive techniques for quantifying and qualifying comfort perception by humans? This paper has attempted to answer this question in a wide literature review, whereby it is possible to highlight many partial aspects that have been studied successfully. Just a few researchers [1–3] have studied the problem of comfort perception and evaluation under a wider point of view. Nevertheless, some aspects seem not to have yet been taken into account. In a previous paper, the authors extended the Vink–Hallbeck model to build a comfort perception/evaluation matrix in which four kinds of comfort related to different humans’ perception were studied and linked to the whole environment's characteristics. In the resultant perception-scheme and in the proposed “fusion rule” (for different kinds of perceived comfort/discomfort), one aspect that played a fundamental role in the final comfort/discomfort perception/evaluation was expectation. Expectation due to preconceived data (acquired or formed in the users’ minds) and the influence of the working environment, can act in terms of additive or subtractive factor in the comfort experience by altering the final comfort/discomfort perception and changing the subjective comfort/discomfort evaluation. This paper presents the results of expectation influence analysis on comfort evaluation. Using the placebo effect, authors conducted a wide experimental test with a wide sample of users, asking them to use and evaluate two identical mattresses that were dressed and described as two different products (the first one as a very cheap mattress and the second one as a high-level and expensive mattress). Differences between subjective evaluations have been statistically processed and correlated to anthropometric parameters to individuate and understand the role of expectation