Effects of Nocturnal Aircraft Noise - Volume 4 : Psychological Effects

Abstract

A sleep laboratory study with 128 subjects was run using questionnaires to investigate the psycho-logical effects of nocturnal aircraft noise on annoyance, subjective aircraft noise exposure (intensity and frequency), sleep sensation, mood, stress and recuperation. 112 subjects served as experimen-tal groups, and they were exposed to aircraft noise of various intensities and frequencies during nine nights. A validation of the laboratory results took place by means of a field study which was conducted with 64 residents living in the vicinity of the Konrad-Adenauer-Airport Cologne/Bonn. For the laboratory study, there is a significant influence of aircraft noise (i.e., significant main ef-fects of the aircraft noise parameters maximum noise level LAS,max, number of aircraft noise events (level frequency), energy equivalent noise level LAS,eq), but not on mood, stress and recuperation. Annoyance and subjective aircraft noise exposure increase significantly with rising LAS,max, level fre-quency and LAS,eq. Regarding the sleep sensation only the frequency and the LAS,eq are relevant. Ac-cording to the prediction of dose-response curves for noise annoyance, which were derived by means of random effects logistic regression, the percentage of aircraft noise annoyed persons in the laboratory rises with increasing LAS,max and frequency. In the field and laboratory, there is an in-crease of the number of noise annoyed persons with rising LAS,eq. In the laboratory, the percentage of annoyed persons decreases above 46.6 dB(A) due to the presentation of louder aircraft noise events with lower frequencies in the night. Thereby, the significance of the number of nocturnal flight movements for the noise annoyance is pointed out. This is confirmed by the predictions made by the field model applying the frequency as independent variable. For the laboratory, significant moderators of annoyance are the assessed “necessity” of air traffic, the gender and the aircraft noise pre-annoyance; for the field the adaptation to aircraft noise and the age are significant.