In Search of the Intrinsic Emotional Meaning of Color

Genov et al.

The ProblemThe idea that there is an association between color and emotion seems obvious to common sense. We are often:

“Feeling blue” “Green with envy” Having “black moods”

However, despite extensive empirical work for over a century, there is still no consensus that the relationships between color and emotion are more than linguistic convention.

Some of the Evidence relationship between color brightness and saturation,

and ratings of pleasurableness red and yellow elicit a greater galvanic skin response

and EEG activity than green and blue red and yellow are associated with higher state-anxiety

scores than blue and green undergraduates scoring above 10 on the Beck

Depression Inventory express a preference for black and brown

some evidence that colors have an effect on: person perception voting behavior aggression in sports

The Classic StroopRED

GREENBLACK

YELLOWBLUERED

YELLOWBLACK

REDGREENBLACKYELLO

WBLUERED

YELLOW

BLACK

The Classic Stroop

Word meaning interferes with color naming

The Emotional Stroop A number of studies have examined the

impact of emotional meaningemotional meaning on color naming.

The participant’s emotional state is positively associated with Stroop interference in the color naming of emotionally salient words.

For example …

The Emotional Stroop

WORRYFAILLOSE

DEADLINEPRESSUREUNEASYAFRAID

DISTRESSED

SADALONE

SORROWPAIN

DOWNSLEEPYTIRED

WORTHLESS

Anxiety

Depression

Emotional Stroop and Color

The rationale of the study: If colors carry intrinsic emotional meaning,

then the color of the ink in which a word is printed might trigger some small emotional response.

If emotion words were printed in colors that triggered incompatibleincompatible emotions or emotion-related cognitive processes, the result should be more interference and a slower response.

That was the basic hypothesis of this study.

Study DesignPast research on color preference has matched emotion-related words to various colors

A Priori Emotion-Color Matches (Collier, 1996)

YELLOW BLACK GREEN BLUE RED

CHEERFUL * HOSTILE TENDER SECURE CHEERFUL *

EXCITING ** DIGNIFIED SOOTHED PEACEFUL EXCITING **

CAREFREE *** GLOOMY CAREFREE *** DISTRESSED EMBARRASSED

PLEASED **** ANGRY ***** PLEASED **** PLEASANT ANGRY *****

PLAYFUL SAD ****** LEISURELY SAD ****** PASSIONATE

SOOTHING UNHAPPY CALM ******* CALM ******* POWERFUL

Some emotion words (n=7) had been previously associated with more than one color; e.g. the word “calm” had been paired with the colors green and blue. These words appear with an * in Table 1. This overlap explains the number of different words used (23) as opposed to the total number of words in each list (30).

Study DesignBased on this, we constructed two lists:

CHEERFULHOSTILETENDER

DIGNIFIEDSAD

EMBARRASSED

Etc.

GLOOMYSOOTHINGCHEERFULCAREFREEHOSTILESECURE

Etc.Each color appeared 6 times in the list, each time with a compatible emotion word. Each list consisted of a total of 30 words arranged in two columns. The incompatible list was formed by inverting the color sequence and by randomly pairing the colors with incompatible emotion words.

Compatible

Non-compatible

Study DesignAnticipating the influence of individual differences in “stroopability,” we included two lists from the classic Stroop:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXX

Etc.

GREENYELLOWBLACKBLUERED

YELLOWEtc.

Study Design Although previous research has shown some

consistency in emotion-color associations across individuals (Collier, 1996), variation also occurs.

We anticipated that the interference would be greatest for people whose individualindividual emotion-color associations were most similar to our a priori emotion-color match. In effect, these participants would be the ones actually exposed to the non-compatible emotion-color condition that we expected to produce more Stroop interference than the compatible condition.

Since any individual variations from these a priori links between color and emotion would obscure the expected effects, in a separate task we asked each participant to match emotion words and colors.

Study Design

1. Experimenter calls out emotion terms, one at a time.

2. Participant points to a color from a selection of color patches as quickly as possible.

3. Experimenter makes a note of choice (preference).

Emotion-color matching task

angry

Study Design The order of tasks was as follows:

1. Stroop task:1. control list (XXXX)2. either compatible or incompatible lists,

counterbalanced3. classic Stroop list

2. Color-matching task

Results When data for the group as a wholeas a whole

were examined, the expected effect was not apparent.

However, when two sources of individual differencesindividual differences were taken into account, the effect emerged. Here are the details …

Results Two-way ANOVA with “type of list” and

“list order” as factors:

significant list x order interaction indicating a practice effect, F (1,40)=7.91, p<.001. Whichever list appeared second was faster on the average by 2 seconds.

The lack of significant main effect for compatibility indicates that there was no overall impact of emotional meaning on the speed of color naming for the sample as a wholefor the sample as a whole, F (1, 40)=.96, p=.33.

In contrast, the classic Stroop effect was highly significant, F (1,40)=128.53, p<.001. The mean time for naming the ink colors for the list of X’s was 21.0 seconds, while the mean time for naming the inks of the color words was 37.3 seconds.

Results Individual differences in color-emotion

matching:

An individual compatibility indexcompatibility index was computed for each participant by calculating the ratio of the number of times a participant’s choice of color-emotion word pair coincided with the a priori color-word match to the total number of a priori color-word pairs. This index was a measure of the degree to which the participant had been exposed to pairings of emotion-words and colors that were incompatible according to his or her idiosyncratic preferences. The minimum percent of individual match was 9.5% and the maximum was 52.3%.

Results Individual differences in classic Stroop:

In addition, participants varied widely in how much they were affected by the classic Stroop manipulation. The difference between the time of naming the XXXX stimuli and the classic Stroop stimuli constituted the index of index of “Stroop effect.”“Stroop effect.” Across our 42 participants, this index ranged from a negligible 0.5-second difference to a 42-second difference between the two lists.

Results Multiple regression:

The index of color/emotion consistency was not related (r=.07, p=.33) to the classic Stroop index.

The target difference in speed of color naming (incompatible - compatible) was positively related (r =.26, p<.05) to the extent to which participants are susceptible to the classic Stroop interference (Stroop-XXXX).

the target difference was positively related (r =.28, p<.05) to the personal compatibility index.

The Multiple regression equation was also significant (Multiple r =.37, p =.0556), indicating that both factors contributed to the color-emotion compatibility effect.

Results ANCOVA:

A statistically comparable analysis was an analysis of covariance in which speed on the compatible and incompatible lists was included as a repeated-measures dependent variable, with group order as an independent variable. The two covariates were the Stroop effect index and of the compatibility of color preferences index.

In this analysis, the mean time for the incompatible list (M=25.4) was significantly longer than for the compatible list (M=22.4), F (1, 38) = 4.40, p < .05, Eta Square = .104.

Discussion The particular contribution of these results is

to demonstrate that the associations between color and emotion operate at a “lower”, more automatic level.

Stroop-like tasks demand the participants to focus sharply, leaving little surplus attentional resources for conscious consideration of explicit emotion-color associations.

Furthermore, participants in Stroop tasks are unaware of the sources of interference, or even of the fact that different kinds of tasks produce different amounts of interference.

Discussion The color-emotion associations investigated

here are not necessarily independent of cultural conventions or specific learning experiences of individual participants.

Indeed, our participants varied considerably in their explicit color-emotion matches, and it was necessary to take these differences into account to detect the effects.

However, whatever the origin of the individual or shared color-emotion associations, they appear to function quite automatically.

Practical Implications Some evidence that colors affect physiological

responses as well as emotional experience and behavior.

Projective tests such as the Rorschach use color to index emotional instability.

More recently, the ability to perceive emotional content in colors has been related to emotional intelligence, empathy (Mayer, DiPaolo, & Salovey, 1990), and creativity (Dailey, Martindale, & Borkum, 1997).

Future Directions Topics that warrant further investigation

include: the sources of individual variation in color-emotion

association the relationship between physiological responses

and subjective emotional responses to colors the exact mechanisms through which colors and

emotions interact

The exciting research possibilities, which these questions present, should certainly put students of the psychology of color in the pink.