Effects of Interior Colors, Lighting and Decors on Perceived Sociability, Emotion and Behavior Related to Social Dining

Today's customers tend to select eating-places for satisfying pleasures through experiential socialization. This study explores how color, lighting and decors have effects on customers' perceived sociability, emotion and behavioural intention on social dining occasions. Experimental method was used and 162 senior students were involved. The results showed that the restaurant with monochromatic colors, dim lighting and plain decors yielded a statistically significant difference in the entire dependent variables with almost any other interior conditions on romantic dining, as opposed to the case of casual dining. Further research on subtler and diverse dimensions of interior element is suggested to enrich previous findings. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B. V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies(cE-Bs), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia