Valentine isolates a deceptively simple question—whether architectural form can produce measurable physiological stress—and uses it to expose both the promise and immaturity of neuroarchitectural experimentation. Following PRISMA-P guidelines, the review examines studies using clinical biomarkers, wearable sensing and simulated environments to test architectural configurations, identifying curvature, enclosure and proportion as the principal formal categories associated with stress responses. The paper’s contribution is not the declaration of preferred shapes but the insistence that architectural variables require operational definitions precise enough to be compared across experiments. Existing evidence is constrained by small research volume, inconsistent definitions, heterogeneous contexts, predominantly unisensory paradigms and short exposure durations. The review therefore converts form from an aesthetic category into a measurable but unstable experimental variable. Its wider bridge is to environmental physiology: architecture can be studied as an external stressor, but meaningful translation requires standardised descriptions of both spatial conditions and bodily response, allowing evidence to travel without losing the circumstances that produced it.
