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1. Introduction
The home is meant to be a place where residents ideally should be in control of their immediate environment, to pursue any activity without constraints from external stressors and uncontrollable circumstances, to feel comfortable, safe, and at ease. The term “perceived control” in this article represents affective attributes, including a sense of control, autonomy, safety, constancy, privacy, retreat, or freedom. In the literature, these aspects of a home are referred to as ontological security [1] or as psychosocial benefits [2,3] and have been related to residential satisfaction [4]. Perceived control is shaped by perceived housing conditions like noise, dampness, temperature, space, or maintenance [2,3,4,5]. Hence, perceived control at home has been proposed as a mediator in the relationship between housing conditions and mental health [6]. Reduced control at home has been linked to, for example, self-rated poor health [7], unwell-being [4], and depression and anxiety [8].
Road traffic noise is an external stressor potentially affecting residents in their homes. Its prevalence in urban areas has been receiving increasing attention in environmental health research [9], as well as European environmental politics [10]. This is underpinned by recent systematic reviews on exposure-response relations in the context of the Environmental Noise Guidelines development process [11] and the impending revision of the European Environmental Noise Directive (END) [12]. The END introduces noise annoyance as a focal health indicator in relation to chronic noise exposure. Besides its overall public health relevance [9] and the apparent need to revise previous annoyance assessments [13,14], noise annoyance represents a pivotal outcome concerning residents’ perceived noise control at home, as discussed below.
Noise annoyance is closely related to the concept of road traffic noise as an “ambient stressor” [15]. Its psychophysiological implications have been causally attributed to exposure-specific uncontrollability and unpredictability in reference to the concept of learned helplessness [5,16,17,18]. These exposure characteristics are particularly pronounced in urban settings, where traffic flows are frequently disrupted (e.g., at signal-controlled intersections or due to traffic congestion on major roads). We have suggested a causal link from chronic noise exposure via perceived uncontrollability of personal noise exposure (hereafter: perceived noise control) to noise annoyance [19]. While classifying perceived noise control as a non-acoustic (psychosocial) determinant of noise annoyance [20], previous research has explained its impact...