When you go to a party of a friend who lives in a McMansion ,the first thing you notice as you enter the house is the huge foyer and the Great room with the 20 ft high ceilings. It's more hotel than home. The second thing you notice is most of the people are clustered in the kitchen where the ceiling is only 8ft high. I think we started out living in caves and we do not want to be in a room that makes us feel we are living in an open field.

Frank Loyd Wright was famous for designing houses with open floor plans and ceilings that were very short but none of his houses felt claustrophobic. The open floor plans and the details made these houses comfortable to live in even though the ceilings in some instances were only 7ft tall. If you design a large room with 12 ft ceilings and small alcoves on the sides most people will gravitate towards the alcoves. They want to cluster in their caves and look out. Its the proportions in a room and the detail in the room that gives character and comfort to the room. A larger room with high ceilings but no detail creates a drywall desert.

The book "A Pattern Language" Oxford University Press by Christopher Alexander describes how to make a space comfortable. The most expensive and ineffective way is to make the space large and uniform with high ceilings

wright was also only 5'8".
i think you'd find that in his houses especially the low ceilings were used as a foil to much larger, taller spaces beyond. it was the contrast.