The central interest of this study is the background experience of an individual. Based on the literature we define background experience as fringe awareness, cognitive feelings, and intuitive feelings. Layers of experience that these concepts try to describe can usually be found in the fringe of our awareness and are as such rarely consciously perceived. As an important element of background experience, we introduced atmosphere, which we tried to capture using an open qualitative research design. During the study we separated it into ambient atmosphere, which denotes affective experience, which is felt as part of the world and us-in-the-world, and deep atmosphere, which pervades our whole experiential landscape. Our primary goal was to map the affective landscapes and recognize atmospheric cornerstones. Through samples of experience and diary entries of three individuals we observed plethora of affective experiences, existential feelings, and moods. Secondary objective was to observe relations between atmosphere as perceived by an individual, atmosphere as perceived by others, their environment and behaviour. With ethnophenomenological multiple case study we gathered ecologically valid data on experience and behaviour of our participants in different environments, based on which we proposed key features of atmosphere and where and how it appears. We extracted and coined multiple categories of affective experience, which build our relation to the world in different ways and with different intensities. We divided the experience of our environment into private, social, and spatial layer. Each of the layers can hold distinctive affects, which differ both in valence and activation, but each contributing to the feeling of ambient atmosphere. We noted two fundamental subcategories of deep atmosphere, perturbation, and unconcern, which we connect with feelings of danger and safety. We note that their affective character imprints both our experiential background and foreground.
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