Conceptual, methodological, and dose-response problems related to annoyance and disturbance

摘要

On an Inter-Noise conference, we should expect every participant to know much about annoyance and disturbance, but I am not shure if we all agree upon their respective definitions. For instance, if a native American, a German, a Chinese, and aJapanese talk about annoyance, all would probably agree that this concept is strongly related to disturbance, but the German would say that unpleasing or "ugly" sound characteristics belong to the concept, in combination with a certain helplessness withrespect to the sound source, the Japanese would specify the sound characteristics as "clamorous", and the Chinese would add "dull" sound characteristics (cf.[12]). And they would probably not agree upon the question, whether the concept of annoyancebelongs to the realm of perceptions, emotions, attitudes, or judgments as results of cognitive operations. With respect to disturbance, they would agree more easily and would probably say that disturbance describes a situation of incompatibility betweensound and the intended activities of a person. They would also agree in not calling it an emotion, but they would not agree upon the question whether attitudes and judmental processes are involved. We are presently undertaking an internationalinvestigation in order to assess the meaning of annoyance with experts in noise or odor research, and some of our participants are attending this conference. The results will be available at the end of 1997. In order to show the huge variance in annoyance definitions, I will first give some examples from the scientific literature.