PERCEPTION Wearing a coat thought to be a doctor’s may improve attention.

So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.

It is not enough to see a doctor’s coat hanging in your doorway, said Adam D. Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who led the study. The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good at paying attention.

The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social Cognition, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition. We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those experiences include the clothes we wear.

“I love the idea of trying to figure out why, when we put on certain clothes, we might more readily take on a role and how that might affect our basic abilities,” said Joshua I. Davis, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College and expert on embodied cognition who was not involved with the study. This study does not fully explain how this comes about, he said, but it does suggest that it will be worth exploring various ideas.

There is a huge body of work on embodied cognition, Dr. Galinsky said. The experience of washing your hands is associated with moral purity and ethical judgments. People are rated personally warmer if they hold a hot drink in their hand, and colder if they hold an iced drink. If you carry a heavy clipboard, you will feel more important.

It has long been known that “clothing affects how other people perceive us as well as how we think about ourselves,” Dr. Galinsky said. Other experiments have shown that women who dress in a masculine fashion during a job interview are more likely to be hired, and a teaching assistant who wears formal clothes is perceived as more intelligent than one who dresses more casually.

But the deeper question, the researchers said, is whether the clothing you wear affects your psychological processes. Does your outfit alter how you approach and interact with the world? So Dr. Galinsky and his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.

In the first, 58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a white lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a test for selective attention based on their ability to notice incongruities, as when the word “red” appears in the color green. Those who wore the white lab coats made about half as many errors on incongruent trials as those who wore regular clothes.

In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly assigned to one of three options: wearing a doctor’s coat, wearing a painter’s coat or seeing a doctor’s coat. Then they were given a test for sustained attention. They had to look at two very similar pictures side by side on a screen and spot four minor differences, writing them down as quickly as possible.

Those who wore the doctor’s coat, which was identical to the painter’s coat, found more differences. They had acquired heightened attention. Those who wore the painter’s coat or were primed with merely seeing the doctor’s coat found fewer differences between the images.

The third experiment explored this priming effect more thoroughly. Does simply seeing a physical item, like the coat, affect behavior? Students either wore a doctor’s coat or a painter’s coat, or were told to notice a doctor’s lab coat displayed on the desk in front of them for a long period of time. All three groups wrote essays about their thoughts on the coats. Then they were tested for sustained attention.

Again, the group that wore the doctor’s coat showed the greatest improvement in attention. You have to wear the coat, see it on your body and feel it on your skin for it to influence your psychological processes, Dr. Galinsky said.

Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state, he said. He described his own experience from last Halloween (or maybe it should be called National Enclothed Cognition Day).

He had decided to dress as a pimp, with a fedora, long coat and cane. “When I entered the room, I glided in,” he said. “I felt a very different presence.”

But what happens, he mused, if you wear pimp clothes every day? Or a priest’s robes? Or a police officer’s uniform? Do you become habituated so that cognitive changes do not occur? Do the effects wear off?

More studies are needed, he said.

Cory Raven

Managing Broker

RE/MAX Select Realty

Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

Vancouver real-estate marketer Cameron McNeill has ordered up 2,010 red umbrellas, which he and his staff will be handing out in downtown Vancouver on Tuesday (February 16). The giveaways will take place between the Yaletown Canada Line station and David Lam Park.

McNeill, founder of TAC Real Estate Corp., says these umbrellas will go to people who might have "forgotten" to wear red to express support for Canada's Olympic athletes.

"I think downtown will be a sea of read and if TAC can be a small part of that, we are proud to help," McNeill stated.

Anyone needing shelter from the rain can pick up a free TAC umbrella at 11 a.m. on Tuesday at the corner of Homer Street and Pacific Avenue.

It's a timely gesture. Today, Vanoc announced that heavy rains forced the cancellation of standing-room general admission tickets at Cypress Mountain snowboard ski cross events on Monday (February 15) and Tuesday.

Meanwhile, organizers of today's Chinese New Year Parade in Vancouver's Chinatown asked teams of marchers to wear red to express their support for Canada's Olympic athletes--which created an even redder-than-usual procession along Pender, Gore, and Keefer streets.

Will the Winter Games help or hinder the metropolitan Vancouver real estate market, or hardly have any affect? Opinion, of course, is divided. Who can know the future?

The past, however, suggests Vancouver real estate is simultaneously exceptional and unexceptional.

Advances and retreats in value, and supply and demand, occur here just as they do in any other metropolis.

But whatever occurs here occurs in a physically singular and culturally diverse geography and occurs because the living here is better than there, not cheaper, but better.

The first private sale of Canadian Pacific Railway land, in 1886, is illustrative of the course of the better-life attraction of Vancouver residency.

The buyer was Walter Graveley, a small-town Ontario native who had done well by real estate in Manitoba. When values there retreated, he came to British Columbia and never left.

He was a co-founder of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and lived long enough to be among those inaugural Vancouver voters who gathered at the old Fairmont Hotel Vancouver in 1936 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the city's incorporation.

In 1886, Vancouver was already an ethnically diverse place.

In the 1881 census, Vancouver residents reported 20 different ethnic or national attachments; in 1891, even more.

Strathcona particularly emerged as a neighbourhood of working class residents, from China and Japan and Italy, followed by South Vancouver.

By the Great War, there was a genuine downtown skyline to the west of Strathcona, capped by the claims of first the Dominion Building, at Hastings and Cambie, and then the World Building, at Pender and Beatty, now better known as the Sun Tower, as tallest buildings in the British Empire.

The municipalities of Point Grey, South Vancouver, and Vancouver would amalgamate as the Great Depression was beginning in 1929. Even during that period the demand for housing continued, with apartment buildings appearing along Oak and Granville Streets and in Kitsilano.

Renting rather than home ownership became the norm in the late '60s as affordability soared beyond the reach of many and a snapshot of the cityscape at the time reveals both low and highrise residential buildings in many areas. The shift to attached residency was noticeable by the middle '70s with the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver issuing guides on what the Strata Property Act meant for consumers.

Political unrest through the '50s, '60s, and '70s in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East sent people to Canada, and a swell of immigration from South Asia began in the late 1970s.

But it was the influx of Hong Kong money leading up to 1997, and the end of Crown colony status there, that really demarcated a hugely visible influx of overseas investment.

"People flight and capital flight," says George Wong of Magnum Projects, a veteran organizer of local real estate sales and marketing campaigns. "There are two reasons why people look for a safe haven for their families and their money, free from political instability."

George Wong's mother left China's Hunan province in 1949, frightened by how her "bourgeois" family might be treated under Communist rule.

The family settled in Hong Kong, but tumultuous protests there against the Cultural Revolution had her feeling unsettled again. In 1973, the family began looking overseas, well in advance of Hong Kong's handover date to China in 1997.

"Some Hong Kong families were very forward thinking, they took the long view," says Wong. "Vancouver was very attractive because it's like the Switzerland of North America."

Safe, stable, with an excellent quality of life and the advantage of being one direct flight away from Asia, Vancouver interested many. Generous rules around an ''investor'' category smoothed the way for individual families to immigrate in the late '20s and early '90s, but also led to criticism that Hong Kong Chinese were ''buying'' Canadian citizenship.

There were also rumbles of discontent over the perception the Hong Kong buyers had artificially inflated prices with their sudden influx of demand for residential property, or that they were absentee landlords, detrimental to the social fabric of individual buildings.

"The resentment, I think, came from the conspicuousness of the wave of spending," says Wong.

Many immigrants from Hong Kong at the time chose to start fresh with their Canadian households, picking up an expensive car or two, furnishing sizable empty homes from top to bottom, or even tearing down existing houses to build new ones.

"It was obvious change that was too much, too fast," Wong points out gently. "I don't think Canadians are prejudiced, but it's human nature to see a new element as an outsider. This is true even within sub-groups of the Chinese community."

There could hardly have been a more conspicuous purchase by a Hong Kong presence than Li Ka-shing's acquisition of the former Expo 86 lands on the north shore of False Creek, for $320 million.

Matt Meehan worked for the world fair and on the sale of the site to Li Ka-shing. Now a senior vice-president with Concord Pacific -- the company developing the massive parcel of land -- he remembers how people working on Expo knew it would be huge, even though the fair didn't seem to register on public consciousness in the Lower Mainland until it was halfway over.

"You have to remember, back then, people were handing around cassette tapes. Unless you'd been to an exposition, people didn't know," Meehan says. "It's not like the electronic age now where if you want to look at anything you can just go to the Internet."

He believes the purchase and development of the Expo lands as one cohesive parcel was the catalyst for what has been dubbed Vancouverism: high-rises developed to complement natural landscapes and community-building amenities like parks and public space.

"If the Expo lands had been chopped up into five or six parcels, we never would have seen the number of parks we have in Downtown South," Meehan says. "I remember when the Urban Fare [grocery store] went in at Davie and Marinaside, people really got a sense that there's a neighbourhood here."

He also remembers the concept of pre-sales -- putting down a deposit on a condo not yet built -- as being something in which Vancouver led the way for the rest of Canada.

"It was something quite familiar to Hong Kong buyers, but pretty foreign for others," Meehan says. "It was quite a new thing to commit to buying a place just by looking at a floor plan, and then waiting a couple of years."

The historical push to buy property in Vancouver has neither been limited just to residences nor to the Hong Kong market. Commercial real estate investment and development analyst Clare Stevens, now with the firm DTZ Barnicke, recalls a boom in selling fully tenanted office buildings in 1978.

"Companies needed space to house the baby-boomer workers," says Stevens. "There was more European investment at that time, and purchases from large financial interests like SunLife and Great West Life Insurance."

The 1982 North American recession put a severe damper on commercial real estate development, but it roared back by the late '80s. However, Stevens says a change in tax policy in the early '90s under the NDP scared away many international investors. The Asian financial collapse of 1997 also virtually eliminated investment from Japan.

In recent days, there have been nibbles from abroad, but "nothing solid," Stevens says. He's not expecting a boom in commercial real estate investment after the 2010 Winter Games, because he simply doesn't see the demand for it in Vancouver.

George Wong of Magnum Projects says healthy residential real estate investment continued in the 1990s from the Taiwanese, and into 2003-2004 from mainland China. He says super ultra-high net worth individuals (i. e., the rich) from all over the world are continuing to buy Vancouver homes to serve as vacation properties. Some of that spending has in turn led to business-related investment, as the newcomers establish a feeling of connection to their playground.

"I think we're an international city that's incredibly livable, and that we've become a world resort destination," Wong says with a smile.

Concord Pacific's Matt Meehan takes it a little bit further, saying Vancouver's success with livable neighbourhoods downtown is being studied with interest by many international cities.

"Expo 86 was a chance for the world to discover us," he says. "Maybe the Olympics are a means for us to show the way."

Broadcaster and reporter Claudia Kwan is a regular contributor to Westcoast Homes. She reads correspondence at twitter.com/thatclaudiakwan.

homes@vancouversun.com

Housing supply and demand reach closer alignment in January

Thursday, February 4, 2010

The study found that even households in an LEED for Neighbourhood Development platinum project -- the highest ranking possible -- achieved only an 18-per-cent reduction. Green buildings and smart-growth planning are important steps, says Searle, noting that while LEED works nicely with the One Planet program, green buildings alone are not nearly enough.

Rising to the challenge

Already frustrated by the process and results he was seeing in his own LEED projects, Geof Syphers of Codding Enterprises welcomed the challenge One Planet Communities offered when developing the Sonoma Mountain Village.

"Even in the very best-case scenario, under an LEED Platinum project, we were only reducing CO2 emissions by 15 to 20 per cent relative to the status quo," says Syphers. "Even if we were beating stringent codes by 40 per cent, and we're supplying half of the power with renewable energy, we're still providing the other half with fossil fuels and causing a net detriment to the planet."

Syphers says the One Planet framework was attractive, in part, because it lays out exactly what is needed to achieve sustainability. "It makes no claim that you'll succeed," he says, "but if you fall short, you'll know exactly what the gap is and why, and then they publish that widely.

"Instead of patting ourselves on the back for reducing waste by 89 per cent, we say we made good progress, but still have a long way to go, and if you can help us, that would be great. It allows real science to happen."

Progressive Reporting

An important tool in the One Planet program is a publicly available annual audit. Searle

describes this aspect as particularly timely in light of recent negative press over green buildings found to be underperforming. "Monitoring is generally a huge gap and it's rare to find a real estate developer that's willing to take risk over a 10-year period to have their progress reviewed. I think it makes a much better product for the consumer and raises the integrity and credibility of a project enormously."

Searle argues that we need to go into sustainable projects with the spirit that they are pioneering opportunities for us to learn what works, and perhaps more importantly, what doesn't.

Priceless Future

Both Searle and Syphers acknowledge that they cannot control the environmental impact residents have when the developer leaves the SOMO development, but when they consider the BedZED experience and others, they estimate that the design, planning and services of the development with help residents reduce their total direct carbon emissions by 83 per cent.

Perhaps even more impressive than this, or the development's enviable bells and whistles, are the great strides being made in changing policy and bylaw barriers.

"My main motivation is to first legalize this and enable it," says Syphers. From variances needed to narrow streets, to the three bills now pending to expand solar applications, Sonoma Mountain Village's greatest impact, like BedZed's, could well be in forging the way for others.

For more information on the SOMO's impressive attributes, visit sonomamountainvillage.com,worldchanging.com/archives/009448.html,or oneplanetcommunities.org

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