Work

What color do you feel? Color choices are driven by mood

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: Popular opinion holds that color has specific affective meaning. Brighter, more chromatic, and warm colors were conceptually linked to positive stimuli and darker, less chromatic, and cool colors to negative stimuli. Whether such systematic color associations exist with actually mood felt remains to be tested. We experimentally induced four moods—joy, relaxation, fear, and sadness—in a between‐subject design (N = 96). Subsequently, we asked participants to select a color, from an unrestricted sample, best representing their current mood. Color choices differed between moods on hue, lightness, and chroma. Yellow hues were systematically associated with joy while yellow‐green hues with relaxation. Lighter colors were matched to joy and relaxation (positive moods) than fear and sadness (negative moods). Most chromatic colors were matched to joy, then relaxation, fear, and sadness. We conclude that color choices represent felt mood to some extent, after accounting for a relatively low specificity for color‐mood associations.

Source: Color Research & Application

DOI: 10.1002/col.22327

Authors: Domicele Jonauskaite, Betty Althaus, Nele Dael, Elise Dan‐Glauser, Christine Mohr

Institution: University of Lausanne

Language: English

Topic: Color perception and design

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, AkzoNobel

Award: Does seeing blue make you think about blue feelings? Disentangling the link between perceptual and linguistic colour-emotion associations