Feeling Blue or Seeing Red? Similar Patterns of Emotion Associations With Colour Patches and Colour Terms (original) (raw)
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Color plays a pivotal role in emotional experiences, influencing mood, perception, and behavior. This article reviews research from 2024 that investigates the relationship between color and emotion across various domains, including psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and design. Key findings include enhanced understanding of how warm and cool colors elicit distinct emotional responses, insights from neuroimaging studies that demonstrate the brain's processing of color stimuli, and applications in therapeutic settings that leverage color to regulate mood. Additionally, research into cultural variations and the influence of color in consumer behavior highlights the diverse ways in which color impacts emotion. The integration of color psychology into fields such as marketing, healthcare, and mental health holds significant promise for improving emotional well-being and decision-making.
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Perception of colour stimuli is found to trigger corresponding emotional and behavioural responses within human beings. Literature establishes that red is stimulating while blue is pacifying. There seems to be divided theories on how these associations are being generated. It is argued widely that colour associated emotional responses are learnt and subjective while another theory is that it is a general innate response. A third theory discusses about a combination of both learnt and innate responses. The present paper reviews literature on the above three suppositions and enlightens on a study done seeking innate, general emotional reactions triggered by colour stimuli.
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Color has the ability to influence a variety of human behaviors, such as object recognition, the identification of facial expressions, and the ability to categorize stimuli as positive or negative. Researchers have started to examine the relationship between emotional words and colors, and the findings have revealed that brightness is often associated with positive emotional words and darkness with negative emotional words (e.g., Meier, Robinson, & Clore, Psychological Science, 15, 82-87, 2004). In addition, words such as anger and failure seem to be inherently associated with the color red (e.g., Kuhbandner & Pekrun). The purpose of the present study was to construct norms for positive and negative emotion and emotion-laden words and their color associations. Participants were asked to provide the first color that came to mind for a set of 160 emotional items. The results revealed that the color RED was most commonly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas YELLOW and WHITE were associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, respectively. The present work provides researchers with a large database to aid in stimulus construction and selection.
Color Research and Application, 2004
Eleven colour-emotion scales, warm–cool, heavy–light, modern–classical, clean–dirty, active–passive, hard–soft, harmonious–disharmonious, tense–relaxed, fresh–stale, masculine–feminine, and like–dislike, were investigated on 190 colour pairs with British and Chinese observers. Experimental results show that gender difference existed in masculine–feminine, whereas no significant cultural difference was found between British and Chinese observers. Three colour-emotion factors were identified by the method of factor analysis and were labeled “colour activity,” “colour weight,” and “colour heat.” These factors were found similar to those extracted from the single colour emotions developed in Part I. This indicates a coherent framework of colour emotion factors for single colours and two-colour combinations. An additivity relationship was found between single-colour and colour-combination emotions. This relationship predicts colour emotions for a colour pair by averaging the colour emotions of individual colours that generate the pair. However, it cannot be applied to colour preference prediction. By combining the additivity relationship with a single-colour emotion model, such as those developed in Part I, a colour-appearance-based model was established for colour-combination emotions. With this model one can predict colour emotions for a colour pair if colour-appearance attributes of the component colours in that pair are known. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 292–298, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20024