No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
What color do you feel? Color choices are driven by mood
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 felt mood 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.
... They found that yellow often corresponded with joy, whereas achromatic colors were associated with sadness. [3] The literature also identifies consistent associations across different studies, linking red with anger and love, pink with love, and various shades such as white, gray, and black with feelings ranging from relief to sadness and fear. [3][4][5][6][7] Further research has connected hues, lightness, and chroma with specific emotions -yellow with joy, yellow-green with relaxation, and lighter shades with positivity. ...
... [3] The literature also identifies consistent associations across different studies, linking red with anger and love, pink with love, and various shades such as white, gray, and black with feelings ranging from relief to sadness and fear. [3][4][5][6][7] Further research has connected hues, lightness, and chroma with specific emotions -yellow with joy, yellow-green with relaxation, and lighter shades with positivity. [3] Their subsequent study highlighted age-specific differences in color-emotion associations, revealing that older adults tend to have more positive and specific color reactions than adolescents. ...
... [3][4][5][6][7] Further research has connected hues, lightness, and chroma with specific emotions -yellow with joy, yellow-green with relaxation, and lighter shades with positivity. [3] Their subsequent study highlighted age-specific differences in color-emotion associations, revealing that older adults tend to have more positive and specific color reactions than adolescents. [6] Despite these significant insights, the influence of mental health on how color and style modulate emotional expression remains underexplored, suggesting a pivotal area for future research. ...
Introduction
Despite advancements in understanding color-emotion correlations, the influence of mental health on this relationship is less studied. Our research explores how mental health impacts emotional expression through color and depiction style.
Methods
Engaging 212 students, we collected 1272 digital drawings representing six primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, calm, excitement, and happiness. Our study, conducted from November to December 2023, utilized a cross-sectional design. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling. We collected both survey responses and participant-generated images. Using Python and OpenCV, we quantified subjective emotional expressions.
Results
Participants predominantly chose red for anger (57.43%), illustrating the red usage percentage for anger, black for fear (38.14%), gray and blue for sadness (27.86%, 27.83%), green for calm (25.73%), and red for both excitement (27.26%) and happiness (22.85%). Fear was the most frequent color fill at 31.58%, with anger the least at 24.95%. Tangible imagery was prevalent (88%–96.2%), while abstract styles were most common in fear depictions (12%). Emotion significantly influences color choices ( P = 0.017~<0.001), color number ( P < 0.001), and image coverage ( P = 0.003). Drawing style comparisons across three mental health levels showed minimal yet significant usage differences: black for fear ( P = 0.037), color variability ( P = 0.027), and purple for calm ( P = 0.012). Despite these differences, mental health did not significantly moderate the relationships between color use and drawing styles.
Conclusion
Our study advanced color-emotion research by letting participants select colors, highlighting minimal mental health impacts on emotional expression and consistent associations across cultures and ages. Using Python and OpenCV to quantify qualitative images has greatly increased analysis objectivity, substantially progressing the field.
... Several recent studies examined plant color in terms of aesthetic, psychological, and physiological effects on multiple scales, including plant organs (Hůla and Flegr 2016), monomers (Jang et al. 2019), and groups (Zhuang et al. 2021). Another studies have confirmed that plants with specific colors have unique effects on fatigue (Yao et al. 2020), mood (Jonauskaite et al. 2018), and emotion (Kexiu et al. 2021). ...
... This finding regarding the positive effects of green and yellow plants on the human body is consistent with previous research (Li 2013;Jang et al. 2019). Yellow hues were reported to be systematically associated with joy, whereas yellow-green hues were reported to be associated with relaxation (Jonauskaite et al. 2018). Using a psychological questionnaire regarding emotional words, Jang et al. (2019) found that green plants produced "calm" and "comfortable" feelings, whereas red plants produced "uneasy" and "intense" feelings. ...
... Furthermore, when the proportion of green + yellow and green + red plants in plant communities with three colors exceeded 85%, the relaxation effect was strongest. A previous study reported that yellow-green hues were associated with relaxation and a feeling of joy (Jonauskaite et al. 2018). In one previous study, when subjects were exposed to groups of real green and red plants, the presence of green plants increased internal concentration more than the presence of red plants (Jang et al. 2019). ...
Exposure to plants has been reported to promote health and reduce stress, and plant color has direct impacts on physical and mental health. We used images of common types of tended plant communities in Shenyang, China, with combinations of yellow, green, and red foliage, as experimental stimuli. A total of 27 images were used as visual stimuli. We used electroencephalography to measure α wave activity (8–13 Hz) in 40 subjects while they viewed visual stimuli. These data were combined with subjective questionnaire data to analyze the relaxing effect of images of tended plant communities with different color types and proportions on people. The results revealed that, although there were slight differences between the electroencephalography and psychological findings, women were significantly more relaxed than men after viewing the images. Physiological and psychological responses varied with the types and proportions of colors in the tended plant communities: those of foliage with combinations of two or three colors induced stronger responses than images with a single color. Specifically, (1) for one-color plant communities, green or yellow plant communities induced a stronger relaxation effect than red plant communities; (2) for two-color plant communities, the optimal color proportion was 55% + 45%, and the green + yellow and green + red color combinations induced a stronger relaxation effect; (3) for three-color plant communities, the relaxation effect was strongest when the color proportion was 55% green + 25% yellow + 20% red. These data would provide a plant color matching in future plant landscape design, which may be helpful for creating healthy and relaxing environments.
Graphical abstract
... Another point of potential significance, as previously noted, is the tendency to overlook specific colors associated with different rewards in previous studies employing the value-driven attentional-capture paradigm (Anderson & Halpern, 2017;Anderson & Kim, 2018;Anderson et al., 2011;Cho & Cho, 2021;Kim & Anderson, 2020;Qi et al., 2013;Sha & Jiang, 2016). Given the potential interaction between color and emotion (e.g., Jonauskaite et al., 2019aJonauskaite et al., , 2019bJonauskaite et al., , 2020, we expressly included 'color' as a factor in our statistical analyses (even though we counterbalanced the specific color-to-valence associations across participants). As argued in the Introduction, this approach may reveal color-valence preferences that might otherwise remain undetected in standard analyses. ...
... Cultural factors, such as the association of red with pleasant emotions in Asian cultures, can influence these preferences. As color evaluations rely on established and stable mental color-emotion representations (e.g., Jonauskaite et al., 2019aJonauskaite et al., , 2019b, our correlation findings suggest that congruence between color-valence pairings in the association phase and participants' preferences facilitates performance. Incongruent pairings do not alter the individual preferences, which then influence performance in the test phase, contributing to the positive correlation that we found (Fig. 3c). ...
... It is also worth mentioning that the potential emotional associations of colors themselves have been largely overlooked in the literature (Jonauskaite et al., 2019a(Jonauskaite et al., , 2019b(Jonauskaite et al., , 2020Maier et al., 2009). These studies demonstrate potential participants' preferences in the selection paradigm. ...
Some studies have suggested that emotion-associated features might influence attentional capture. However, demonstrating valence-dependent distractor interference has proven challenging, possibly due to the neglect of individuals’ color–valence preferences in standard, averaged reaction-time (RT) measures. To address this, we investigated valence-driven attentional-capture using an association phase in which emotionally neutral vs. positive-feedback photographs were paired with two alternative target colors, red vs. green. This was followed by a test phase requiring participants to search for a pop-out shape target in the presence or absence of an emotion-associated color. In Experiments 1 and 2, this color could only appear in a distractor, while in Experiment 3, it appeared in the target. Analyzing the standard, averaged RT measures, we found no significant valence association or valence-modulated attentional capture. However, correlational analyses revealed a positive relationship between individual participants’ color–valence preference during the association phase and their valence-based effect during the test phase. Moreover, most individuals favored red over green in the association phase, leading to marked color-related asymmetries in the average measures. Crucially, the presence of the valence-preferred color anywhere in the test display facilitated RTs. This effect persisted even when the color appeared in one of the distractors (Experiments 1 and 2), at variance with this distractor capturing attention. These findings suggest that task-irrelevant valence-preferred color signals were registered pre-attentively and boosted performance, likely by raising the general (non-spatial) alertness level. However, these signals were likely kept out of attentional-priority computation to prevent inadvertent attentional capture.
... Jonauskaite, and colleagues (2020a) assessed emotion associations with basic colour terms in 30 nations and 24 languages. Results showed fairly consistent cross-cultural associations with all colour terms but PURPLE (also see, Hupka et al., 1997;Jonauskaite et al., 2019aJonauskaite et al., , 2019b. Similarly, French speakers in Switzerland showed little agreement on which emotions should be associated with PURPLE, whether presented as a term or a patch, in contrast to the remaining colour terms (Jonauskaite et al., , 2020a(Jonauskaite et al., , 2020b. ...
... This colour category describes shades of colours lying between those described by the colour categories RED and BLUE. PURPLE stands out from the other basic colour terms by being much less homogeneous both in terms of the location of focal colours (Lindsey & Brown, 2014;Uusküla & Bimler, 2016a) and its emotional meaning within (Jonauskaite et al., , 2020a(Jonauskaite et al., , 2020b and between countries (Hupka et al., 1997;Jonauskaite et al., 2020aJonauskaite et al., , 2020bJonauskaite et al., , 2019aJonauskaite et al., , 2019b. ...
... A previous study showed that focal colours for PURPLE varied between 13 languages from different language families and groups (Uusküla & Bimler, 2016a). Therefore, our participants who had a lighter mental representation of PURPLE might have had more positive mental emotion representations (e.g., Dael et al., 2016;Jonauskaite et al., 2019aJonauskaite et al., , 2019bSpecker et al., 2018;Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). Furthermore, there always remains a possibility that the meaning of emotion terms varies across languages and individuals, and this variability influences affective associations. ...
Colour-emotion association data show a universal consistency in colour-emotion associations , apart from emotion associations with PURPLE. Possibly, its heterogeneity was due to different cognates used as basic colour terms between languages. We analysed emotion associations with PURPLE across 30 populations, 28 countries, and 16 languages (4,008 participants in total). Crucially, these languages used the cognates of purple, lilac, or violet to denote the basic PURPLE category. We found small but systematic affective differences between these cognates. They were ordered as purple > lilac > violet on valence, arousal, and power biases. Statistically, the cognate purple was the most strongly biased towards associations with positive emotions, and lilac was biased more strongly than violet. Purple was more biased towards high power emotions than violet, but cognates did not differ on arousal biases. Additionally, affective biases differed by population, suggesting high variability within each cognate. Thus, cognates partly account for inconsistencies in the meaning of PURPLE, without explaining their origins.
... In contrast, cool colors like blue and green are perceived as calming (Madden et al., 2000), invoking feelings of peace and relaxation, and promoting sensations of tranquility and freshness (Richardson et al., 1994). Furthermore, light colors bring about feelings of peace (Gorn, Chattopadhyay, Yi, & Dahl, 1997) and are associated with positive emotions such as happiness and relaxation (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). High saturation colors tend to increase excitement and likability (Gorn et al., 1997), and are linked to feelings of pleasure (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). ...
... Furthermore, light colors bring about feelings of peace (Gorn, Chattopadhyay, Yi, & Dahl, 1997) and are associated with positive emotions such as happiness and relaxation (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). High saturation colors tend to increase excitement and likability (Gorn et al., 1997), and are linked to feelings of pleasure (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). ...
... Colors can be divided into bright colors and dark colors. More brilliant and more colorful colors are rated as more pleasing; darker and more colorful colors are considered more exciting; and darker and more saturated colors are considered more dominant (Jonauskaite, Althaus, Dael, Dan-Glauser, & Mohr, 2018). The association between color and emotional dimensions holds; for example, light colors are rated more positively than dark colors The music itself has been cross-linked with color. ...
... The association between color and emotional dimensions holds; for example, light colors are rated more positively than dark colors The music itself has been cross-linked with color. Music with a faster tempo and in significant mode (rated as "happy" music) is adapted to more saturated, brighter, and yellower colors compared to music with a slower tempo and minor mode (graded as "sad" music), which adjusted for fewer saturated, darker, and blue colors from a sample of 37 colors (Jonauskaite et al., 2018). ...
p>Changing from the 2013 curriculum to a Merdeka curriculum means that learning tools, including teaching materials, must be adjusted to appropriate learning outcomes and objectives of history subject. This research aims to determine the need for media, content, and language teaching materials. This research uses a qualitative study with a descriptive approach. Primary data sources were obtained from informants, namely Malang teachers and high school students, and observations in the field. The stages of data analysis are data reduction, data display, conclusion, and verification. The results show that the need for teaching materials in terms of media, namely: availability of wifi in schools and student internet quota, preferred font types are Calibri and Arial, preferred colors are bright colors, all students have smartphones with medium-high specifications, and videos and images in teaching materials must be explicit. There is a need for teaching materials in terms of content. Namely, the curriculum used is the Merdeka curriculum. Students prefer independent study, and some questions stimulate students to think historically. There is a need for teaching materials in terms of language. Namely, the language used as an introduction is Indonesian, and the language used must be easy for students to understand.</p
... This may be related to the fact that colours have specific affective meanings. For example, Jonauskaite et al. (2019a) found that a lighter shade of yellow was associated with joy, yellow-green with relaxation, and that a darker yellow was perceived as a less pleasant colour. Although pink and blue have traditionally been linked to gender -blue for boys and pink for girls (Jonauskaite et al. 2019b) these authors found that both pink and blue are linked to positive emotions. ...
... Since the participants believed specific happy scenes that are unrelated to the medical event might help the children to feel better, it may also be related to the fact that these types of scenes are often linked to specific colours. For example, Jonauskaite et al. (2019a) found that imaginary scenes, such as the beach scene may be linked to the colour blue and a sunset to red. ...
Background: Access to technology (and data) through mobile health (mHealth) can alleviate some of the challenges children experience in accessing healthcare services. However, the South African context is unique with children living in under-resourced and rural communities, with limited transport, long commute times to reach clinics, and poor access to technology.
Therefore, even though mHealth tools can be beneficial, researchers need to determine the feasibility of such an application for the South African context.
Aim: The study focussed on determining the feasibility of the PicPecc application (app) (an mHealth tool) in South Africa for children requiring mental health support.
Setting: The study included 20 children between the age of 7 years and 18 years in different mainstream schools and a special school.
Methods: A qualitative research design was used to conduct structured interviews with children, either via an online meeting (e.g., Google Meet) or in a natural setting (in the child’s school or home context).
Results: The data were analysed and themes were identified according to five dimensions of access to healthcare and technology, namely acceptability, availability, accessibility, affordability, and accommodation.
Conclusion: This study found that the PicPecc app is promising for implementation in the South African clinical setting. Participants reported various advantages when utilising the app to self-report health symptoms and thus considered it feasible for implementation in the South African context.
Contribution: The study highlights important considerations for the implementation of mHealth technologies in the South African context.
Keywords: access to healthcare; children; eHealth; health technology; mobile health; paediatric.
... The background and text colors in both the positive and negative conditions are in line with findings from research that investigated the interplay between colors and emotions [32,33]. Specifically, music that is generally perceived as happier (major key) is often associated with colors that are brighter, more saturated, and more yellowish, while music that is generally perceived as more sad (minor key) is often associated with colors with the opposite characteristics, i.e., leaning towards bluish hues [32]. ...
... Specifically, music that is generally perceived as happier (major key) is often associated with colors that are brighter, more saturated, and more yellowish, while music that is generally perceived as more sad (minor key) is often associated with colors with the opposite characteristics, i.e., leaning towards bluish hues [32]. Largely consistent with such findings, people show increased propensity to depict their mood with the color yellow following an induction of a joyous mood [33]. Based on these results, the positive mood condition used orange text on a yellow background, while the negative condition had gray text on a blue background (Table 3). ...
Researchers have employed a variety of methodologies to induce positive and negative mood states in study participants to investigate the influence that mood has on psychological, physiological, and cognitive processes both in health and illness. Here, we investigated the effectiveness and the duration of mood effects following the mood induction task (MIT), a protocol that combines mood-inducing sentences, auditory stimuli, and autobiographical memory recall in a cohort of healthy Japanese adult individuals. In Study 1, we translated and augmented the mood-inducing sentences originally proposed by Velten in 1968 and verified that people perceived the translations as being largely congruent with the valence of the original sentences. In Study 2, we developed a Japanese version of the mood induction task (J-MIT) and examined its effectiveness using an online implementation. Results based on data collected immediately after induction showed that the J-MIT was able to modulate the mood in the intended direction. However, mood effects were not observed during the subsequent performance of a cognitive task, the Tower of London task, suggesting that the effects did not persist long enough. Overall, the current results show that mood induction procedures such as the J-MIT can alter the mood of study participants in the short term; however, at the same time, they highlight the need to further examine how mood effects evolve and persist through time to better understand how mood induction protocols can be used to study affective processes more effectively.
... Introduction When asked to represent current mood through color, participants are relatively consistent in their color choices (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). The study found that joyful mood was best represented by chromatic and light colors, often of yellow hues. ...
... Methods Between-subjects, we induced joy (37 participants, 13 men) or fear (40 participants, 10 men) with a validated mood induction technique (Mayer et al., 1995). We also induced a neutral mood in all participants (Velten, 1968) in analogy to an earlier study (see Jonauskaite et al., 2019). Then, while in a happy or fearful mood, using a computerized color picker, participants selected colors best representing four emotion concepts -love, anger, disgust, and admiration. ...
Would you pick another color than red for love when in a bad mood? We investigated whether current mood states might overrun abstract color-emotion relationships.
We found comparable color choices for four emotion concepts, irrespective of the participants' induced mood (joy or fear). The current affective state seems to have little impact on how one thinks about colors.
... We suggest using the knowledge about color mood. Numerous studies have confirmed that color can affect people's mood [31][32], and this conclusion is also valid for children [31]. Bright colors such as yellow, orange, and red are related to joy. ...
... Bright colors such as yellow, orange, and red are related to joy. Compared to dark colors, light colors are easier to relax [32]. Therefore, we suggest using brighter colors when designing the kid mode interface to enhance kid's sense of relaxation and pleasure when using the software, which will not only promotes children to exercise their thinking and enhance creativity, but also allows parents to clearly know whether the kid mode is turned on. ...
Children now use leisure software more and more frequently through electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, and tablets. Therefore, it is particularly important to solve the problems that arise when children interact with computers. Most of the leisure software are also commonly used by adults. Although most of these software have child protection mechanisms (such as the kid mode), due to some shortcomings in their functions and interactions, the needs of parents and children cannot be fully met. How to solve these defects is an important issue. In this article, we examined how to further develop these deficiencies dependent on the standards of the principles of participatory design and user-centered design. We first divide these deficiencies into two types, namely, the inability to meet the needs of children and the inability to meet the needs of parents. Next, we put forward our suggestions for these defects from the three perspectives of functionality, interactivity and visual communication. Finally, we found that our research has certain limitations and raised expectations for future researchers.
... Additionally, the effects of color were never reported, and typically the effects were reported as averages across the two colors. Recent studies on color-emotion preferences have demonstrated that red is often emotionally biased, whereas green or purple are not (Jonauskaite et al., 2019(Jonauskaite et al., , 2020. Furthermore, Maier et al. (2009) found that red is typically preferred over green in spontaneous selection paradigms. ...
Human visual attention is strongly influenced by rewards, affecting both top-down and bottom-up attentional processes. The value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) paradigm, introduced by Anderson et al. (2011b), has had a significant impact on the field of visual attention. In particular, it has facilitated scientific understanding of how a previously task-irrelevant stimulus (e.g., a red circle) paired with monetary or social rewards can capture attention when presented as a distractor (e.g., red) in subsequent non-reward shape-search tasks (e.g., diamond). However, recent work using the traditional VDAC paradigm has produced controversial research findings. The present systematic review, including 23 publications (52 experiments), investigated whether a) reward-associated features might influence attentional capture subsequently, and b) the VDAC paradigm provides a reliable experimental approach to examine the reward-attention relationship. The analysis of these VDAC experiments has revealed methodological concerns, including history-selection confounds, issues with color-reward associations, color-luminance effects and preferences, and low statistical power. Reward-associated features influence attentional capture, however, the current VDAC paradigm provides weak experimental effects. Critically , the literature review provides a concise evaluation of the VDAC paradigm and offers potential directions for further experimental research.
... The study of emotions has captivated psychologists, falling into three categories: subjective experience, physiological underpinnings (Izard, 2004), and outward expressions (Dickson et al., 1998). Investigations into the relationship between emotions and color indicate that color preferences may reflect emotional states (Jonauskaite et al., 2018). Studies of the physiological foundations of emotions reveal that emotional stress can elicit aggressive behaviors in animals (Wang et al., 2007). ...
The objective of this research is to delve into the psychological validity and the intricate mapping connections between spatial distance metaphors and emotional concepts. By broadening the scope of empirical investigation into abstract concepts and spatial metaphors, this study ventures into the realm of emotional concepts. It innovatively combines the front-back distance dimension with the traditional left-right orientation dimension. And it synthesizes the static cognitive framework and dynamic motivational currents in the methodology. Employing experimental protocols based on the forced selection technique and a tailored spatial Stroop paradigm. And the research reveals several key insights: spatial distance metaphors for emotional concepts are grounded in psychological reality; these metaphors exhibit an asymmetry, reflecting a unidirectional mapping process. Emotion concepts have an effect on the perception of spatial proximity. However, the effect of spatial proximity on the representation of affective concepts varies. These findings offer substantial evidence to underpin future inquiries into the metaphorical representation of emotions in terms of spatial distance, suggesting that a deeper exploration of these mapping dynamics is warranted.
... Despite not intentionally designing its logo in red for marketing, Coca-Cola inadvertently had a positive outcome. According to research, red was frequently selected as the color to elicit happiness [3]. Red, on the other hand, is more memorable than hues like purple, blue, and green [4]. ...
In recent years, globally recognized brands' advantages have become evident. Firms are expanding globally, intensifying competition. To maintain market share, retain customers, and enhance profitability, many global companies are focusing on marketing strategies. The Coca-Cola Company, founded in 1892, is a US-based multinational leader in beverages. It markets soft drinks, notably its flagship brand Coca-Cola, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks globally. This article mainly examines Coca-Colas unique marketing strategies and their impacts worldwide. This research analyzes Coca-Cola's marketing strategy using journals, media, financial reports, and big data. By exploring a variety of data resources, this study combines quantitative (stock price, earnings, sales) and qualitative (academic, media) analysis to evaluate marketing initiatives' impacts, inferring effects from data fluctuations. Coca-Cola's multifaceted marketing strategies, particularly sensory marketing, localization strategy, and co-branding, have proven effective in enhancing brand perception, raising awareness, and boosting profitability and sales. This paper may offer some references for other small- and medium-sized enterprises.
... Regarding the psychological explanation, experimental studies partially support the popular notion that colour preference or colour use can be indicative of others' internal emotional states (Baniani, 2022;Jonauskaite et al., 2019): joy is paired with yellow, particularly bright yellow, but certainly not with achromatic shades. Achromatic colours align with the colours of depression and anxiety (Carruthers et al., 2010). ...
The analysis of children's drawings is an important part of the educational and psychological research toolbox, and in drawing analysis the colours of representation are valuable psychological variables. In our experimental study, we use computer vision to identify the colours of drawings of God in Catholic school children (N = 360) and compare the process and results of analysis using K-means clustering and a classification approach. Our results show that the two methods do not produce the same results. The classification approach is a simpler procedure and is more suitable for comparing the results of different studies on the same topic. The colours of the students' drawings of God are, in descending order (excluding white): acromatic, blue, orange, yellow. The percentages of colours can be used in further analysis for educational and psychological studies of the use of colour.
... Vibrant hues can energize certain areas, while softer shades can establish a calming atmosphere. Distinct colors can be allocated to different zones in the school (e.g., classrooms, hallways, recreational spots) for better color segmentation which aids student orientation and fosters a unique identity for each area (Ma, Liu, Zhang & Li, 2023;Armaki and Farhadnia, 2021;Jonauskaite et al., 2019;Hanada, 2018; Al-Ayash, Kane, Smith and Green-Armytage, 2016 Azad ). ...
... On the other hand, cool colors are often used to create a feeling of peace, serenity, and self-reflection in movie scenes. However, it is also connected to negative stimuli and are conceptually associated with feelings of sadness and negativity (Jonauskaitė et al., 2018). The deliberate use of cool colors in cinematography can have a profound effect on how viewers perceive and emotionally react to a scene, whether it's to convey a sense of mystery or to evoke feelings of detachment or isolation. ...
Tourism marketing plays a crucial role in promoting destinations and attracting tourists. Nevertheless, tourism marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to attract the interest of potential travelers in a crowded digital environment. Short films have become a popular and effective medium to market destinations and influence tourist behavior due to their visually captivating storytelling and ability to evoke emotions in a short duration. Studying the impact of short films on tourism marketing is essential to comprehend their influence on tourist motivations, destination perceptions, and purchasing decisions. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the persuasion strategies used in promoting various tourist destinations through short films. By conducting a descriptive qualitative study, this study seeks to understand various semiotic elements and narratives in their short films to create persuasive messages that appeal to potential tourists. The analysis of these short films as persuasive narratives will provide insights into how cultural meanings are constructed and communicated through tourism marketing. By understanding the semiotic elements and persuasive narratives employed in these short films, we can gain a deeper understanding of how persuasive messages are crafted and how they influence tourists' perceptions and decision-making processes. Keywords: semiotics; short film; tourism; promotional; persuasive narrative
... There have been many psychological studies aiming to reveal the association between visual colors and human emotions. For example, in [59] the relationship between four emotions and the corresponding colors is studied. The results showed that the emotional states of the users can influence their preference of colors based on hue, lightness, and saturation. ...
Existing research on music visualization has primarily focused on creating animated visual illustrations to accompany the music being played based on fundamental attributes such as sound frequency or music structure, whereas the higher-level features, including mood and timbre, are mostly overlooked. In this paper, we propose visual signatures to describe the higher-level attributes of music, where the content and the color palette of the visual signatures are controlled by the music mood and timbre, respectively. We expect that the users with different cultural and educational backgrounds will be able to easily interpret the meaning of sound with the proposed visual signatures. In our work, we used a contrastive learning neural network for mood classification and an audio transformer for timbre classification. The performance of the music classification models is examined by their accuracy, while multiple generated images are displayed to showcase the feasibility of visual signatures.
... When we are in a negative mood, we may subconsciously want to wear darker colors. Jonausukaite et al. reported the correlation between color and mood [28], participants were first exposed to music and reading that induced four mental states: joy, relaxation, fear, and sadness. They then selected seven chromatic colors and achromatic colors on a display that were appropriate for that emotion. ...
Human emotional intelligence manages one’s own emotions and determines appropriate behavior in social life. This study investigates whether emotional intelligence and period influence the factors of clothing color selection. Different frameworks and situations were represented, and they were limited to regular examination periods for college students. The purpose of the study was to compare and evaluate how the tension factor, which is generally expected to increase during the examination period, makes a difference in the choice of clothing color. Experiment 1 was conducted during the regular period (n = 103) and the examination period (n = 107). Analysis of the collected data for the 13 hues showed a significant increase in the percentage of G (green) and W (white) jackets during the examination period. Conversely, the use of N (gray) and Bk (black) decreased significantly. In Experiment 2, we investigated the reasons for the choice of clothing color. In the regular period, the main reasons for choosing the color of clothing were the person’s preference (23.8%). However, 70.6% of the subjects in the examination period cited their mood, compared to 4.8% in the regular period. These findings suggest that the difference in the choice of clothing color in both periods could be influenced by emotional intelligence.
... One study established the foundation by identifying a low-to-moderate consensus on color-emotion pairings 4 . Subsequent investigations by Jonauskaite et al. 22 delved deeper, notably in 2019, linking hues, lightness, and chroma to specific emotions yellow to joy, yellow-green to relaxation, and lighter shades to positivity. This pivotal shift, primarily concerning young adults, underscored age's impact on color-emotion perception. ...
This study delves into expressing primary emotions anger, happiness, sadness, and fear through drawings. Moving beyond the well-researched color-emotion link, it explores under-examined aspects like spatial concepts and drawing styles. Employing Python and OpenCV for objective analysis, we make a breakthrough by converting subjective perceptions into measurable data through 728 digital images from 182 university students. For the prominent color chosen for each emotion, the majority of participants chose red for anger (73.11%), yellow for happiness (17.8%), blue for sadness (51.1%), and black for fear (40.7%). Happiness led with the highest saturation (68.52%) and brightness (75.44%) percentages, while fear recorded the lowest in both categories (47.33% saturation, 48.78% brightness). Fear, however, topped in color fill percentage (35.49%), with happiness at the lowest (25.14%). Tangible imagery prevailed (71.43–83.52%), with abstract styles peaking in fear representations (28.57%). Facial expressions were a common element (41.76–49.45%). The study achieved an 81.3% predictive accuracy for anger, higher than the 71.3% overall average. Future research can build on these results by improving technological methods to quantify more aspects of drawing content. Investigating a more comprehensive array of emotions and examining factors influencing emotional drawing styles will further our understanding of visual-emotional communication.
... However, special groups, such as elderly and disabled people, are particularly vulnerable to isolation in contact-free epidemic prevention, and the 'digital divide' barrier that exists has been exposed. In the case of elderly people, for instance, the epidemic era has limited the scope of their activities, which has prevented many elderly people with chronic diseases from receiving timely medical treatment Hou, 2021 andJonauskaite et al. 2019). A barrier-free and intelligent health care system for elderly people in the epidemic era has not yet been developed. ...
In the context of the epidemic, the daily routines of China’s elderly populace underwent substantial transformations. The implementation of home-based pandemic containment strategies led to heightened levels of social isolation and loneliness, exerting a discernible influence on the subjective well-being of this demographic. Consequently, residing in retirement apartments has emerged as a more advantageous alternative for elderly individuals capable of self-care. To meet their life and emotional needs and improve their sense of well-being, we used the KANO model to design a health management app for the self-care of older persons. We summarised the functional requirements for the self-care of elderly people, distributed questionnaires to generate a list of requirements, and conducted data analysis. We optimised the low-fidelity prototype based on the usability test results combined with relevant interface design elements to implement emotional interaction design practices for older persons’ self-care. Furthermore, we completed a design evaluation and program optimisation of the design practice to guide the final visual design. The research findings identify the core principles of interactive design for elderly users to enable visual design specifications for improving the lives of the elderly population. This research highlights the need to design more appropriate products that meet demographic characteristics. This work contributes to strengthening the connection between elderly people and society while bridging the ‘digital divide’ based on this population’s cautious approach to technologies and declining abilities to learn.
... It is known that there are correspondences between black and the senses of mourning or sadness, with red being associated with issues such as passion or sensuality or pink, with sweet and feminine symbolism. It is worth highlighting the modernity of these symbols, as from the Middle Ages, through periods such as the Renaissance, until the mid-1800s, blue was seen as a chromatic element representing femininity and purity (Silva, 2017;Jonauskaite et al., 2018). ...
This paper is part of a master’s in design research that aims to identify whether potential fashion consumers’ interpretation of the colors of clothing collections was aligned with the intention of their designers/coders. Fashion designers face the task of making conceptual and thematic choices to convey a message effectively. Within the various elements of visual language employed for this purpose, color plays a crucial role due to its symbolic significance in visual communication. Hence, this paper aims to delve into the interpretive possibilities associated with the semantic dimension of a color chart. This exploration involves assessing the extent to which the designers’ intentions are realized in the visual message conveyed by the colors within a clothing collection, as perceived by potential Generation Z consumers. To achieve this, we employed the Semantic Differential (SD) and Free Word Association (FWA) methods in our research. We interviewed eight designers responsible for coding the two fashion collections under investigation and gathered responses from 108 potential Generation Z fashion consumers to gain insight into their interpretations. According to the results, the effectiveness in delivering color messages varied between medium and high. It was concluded that fashion designers employ two strategies for coding the color chart: maintaining chromatic symbologies already widespread in society and subversion of color codes. Meanwhile, potential consumers interpret colors according to their propagated sociocultural meanings.
... Many papers deal with the association of color and emotion because the emotions aroused by colors affect daily life (Valdez and Mehrabian, 1994). For example, product colors positively or negatively influence consumer attitudes (Kotler, 1973;Albert, 2007;Jonauskaite et al., 2019). Wilms and Oberfeld (2018) showed in a study that changing the hue, brightness and saturation of a color could have an impact on the emotional and physiological response. ...
Introduction
Designers know that part of the appreciation of a product comes from the properties of its materials. These materials define the object’s appearance and produce emotional reactions that can influence the act of purchase. Although known and observed as important, the affective level of a material remains difficult to assess. While many studies have been conducted regarding material colors, here we focus on two material properties that drive how light is reflected by the object: its metalness and smoothness. In this context, this work aims to study the influence of these properties on the induced emotional response.
Method
We conducted a perceptual user study in virtual reality, allowing participants to visualize and manipulate a neutral object – a mug. We generated 16 material effects by varying it metalness and smoothness characteristics. The emotional reactions produced by the 16 mugs were evaluated on a panel of 29 people using James Russel’s circumplex model, for an emotional measurement through two dimensions: arousal (from low to high) and valence (from negative to positive). This scale, used here through VR users’ declarative statements allowed us to order their emotional preferences between all the virtual mugs.
Result
Statistical results show significant positive effects of both metalness and smoothness on arousal and valence. Using image processing features, we show that this positive effect is linked to the increasing strength (i.e., sharpness and contrast) of the specular reflections induced by these material properties.
Discussion
The present work is the first to establish this strong relationship between specular reflections induced by material properties and aroused emotions.
... As an example, red has both positive and negative connotations. [3][4][5][6][7][8] From a biological perspective, these connotations can be considered to be due to an evolutionary adaptation for avoiding danger associated with animals or foods with red colouration and interpreting red angry flushed faces as threatening (e.g., References [9,10]). In addition, red is thought to have implications for mate selection and attraction through red flushing faces indicating receptiveness to sex and romantic interest in heterosexual mating contexts. ...
This study aims to empirically test whether identifying as a supporter of either New South Wales (NSW) or Queensland (QLD) rugby league teams influences the extent that their respective team colors blue and maroon are associated with positively and negatively valenced words. We used a valence categorization experiment and affective rating task (valence and preference) to investigate if team affiliation and shared ingroup experience influenced affective associations with team colors. NSW supporters were faster and more accurate when categorizing positive words presented in blue than maroon font and negative words in maroon than blue font. While QLD supporters did not significantly differ when categorizing words in either blue or maroon, they rated blue and maroon equally positively in contrast to the NSW supporters. Results from this study give us greater insights into how color-valence associations can be formed through subcultural ingroup affiliations.
... 7 Fortunately, empirical work in this area has been gradually accumulating. Among others, studies have linked color with cognitive representations of emotion, [8][9][10][11] facial and bodily expression of emotion, [12][13][14][15][16] and emotion experiences, [17][18][19] while also considering these across diverse cultural groups. 11,20,21 Research has revealed systematic interconnections between dimensions underlying color and dimensions underlying emotion, for example, by linking hue, saturation, and lightness with valence, arousal, and dominance. ...
This Special Collection aims to report the latest research that advances scientific knowledge and theory regarding the interplay between color perception, color cognition, and emotional processes. There is a great public interest in understanding how colors and emotions are interconnected, and how colors might be utilized to shape emotional experiences. To facilitate empirically grounded understanding in this domain, the Editors welcome scholarly articles pertaining to the study of color and emotion. Topics might include, but are not limited to, conceptual correspondences between color and emotion, the effects of perceiving color on emotion, and the application of color toward enhancing emotion-regulation, well-being, or emotive communication.
... This is due to a lack of measurement of color properties, not controlling for lightness and hue when assessing chroma-emotion associations, or utilizing color words instead of presenting actual color stimuli. Some investigations have circumvented these problems (e.g., Jonauskaite et al., 2019;Palmer, Schloss, Xu, et al., 2013;Schloss et al., 2020;Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994;Wilms & Oberfeld, 2018), which provide the most compelling evidence for relations between chroma and valence/arousal. However, they utilized a methodology focusing on isolated color swatches, leaving the question of how the chromatic content of objects or scenes (rather than color in isolation) relates to emotions. ...
Research on color–emotion associations provides evidence that hue, chroma, and lightness relate to various emotional experiences. Most of this research has assessed these relationships via isolated color swatches while confounding color dimensions. We broadened the medium in which color–emotion associations were made by manipulating color in photographs varying in valence and/or arousal, and we solely focused on the chroma dimension. In Experiment 1, participants perceived neutral and positive-valence photographs to be happier and more arousing when displayed chromatically, relative to achromatically. In Experiment 2, participants increased the chroma content of photographs to make them appear maximally happy, and they decreased the chroma content of photographs to make them appear maximally sad. In Experiment 3, participants altered the chroma content of photographs to their preferred levels, with positive-valence photographs containing the most chroma, followed by neutral, then negative-valence photographs. In Experiment 4, participants increased the chroma content of photographs to make them appear maximally positive or arousing, and they decreased chroma to make photographs appear maximally negative or calming. This pattern was similar regardless of the initial valence/arousal content of the images. These results indicate that chroma may convey emotion-relevant information independent of hue or lightness.
... In the theme stage, the patient's health situation was more sensitively portrayed. For example, color was used as a metaphor to indicate the patient's state of mind, such as black to represent depression or unhappiness (Jonauskaite et al., 2019;Müller et al., 2022). As a result, the learners increasingly mastered the presentation of the situated patient through reflection. ...
... elicit positive moods such as joy and relaxation (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). ...
As society and the economy have advanced, the focus of architectural and interior environment design has shifted from practicality to eliciting emotional responses, such as stimulating environments and innovative inclusive designs. Of particular interest is the home environment, as it is best suited for achieving restorative effects, leading to a debate between interior qualities and restorative impact. This study explored the relationships between home characteristics, restorative potential, and neural activities using the Neu-VR. The results of the regression analysis revealed statistically significant relationships between interior properties and restorative potential. We examined each potential characteristic of the home environment that could have a restorative impact and elucidated the environmental characteristics that should be emphasized in residential interior design. These findings contribute evidence-based knowledge for designing therapeutic indoor environments. And combining different restorative potential environments with neural activity, discussed new neuro activities which may predict restorativeness, decoded the new indicators of neuro activity for environmental design.
... Colors are known to have an impact on emotions (Jonauskaite et al 2019). Thus, an important question is whether the colors of a visual might affect the emotional response to the visual. ...
We carry out two online experiments with large representative samples
of the U.S. population to study key climate visuals included in the Sixth
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In
the first study (N=977), we test whether people can understand such
visuals, and we investigate whether color consistency within and across
visuals influences respondents’ understanding, their attitudes towards
climate change and their policy preferences. Our findings reveal that
respondents exhibit a remarkably good understanding of the IPCC visu-
als. Given that IPCC visuals convey complex multi-layered information,
our results suggest that the clarity of the visuals is extremely high. More-
over, we observe that altering color consistency has limited impact on
the full sample of respondents, but affects the understanding and the
policy preferences of respondents who identify as Republicans. In the
second study (n=1169), we analyze the role played by colors’ seman-
tic discriminability, that is the degree to which observers can infer a
unique mapping between the color and a concept (for instance red and
warmth have high semantic discriminability). We observe that seman-
tic discriminability does not affect attitudes towards climate change or
policy preferences and that increasing semantic discriminability does not
improve understanding of the climate visual.
... Although art can potentially be used to measure the human mind and culture in various ways, this study focused on analyzing its color, especially brightness, as it is a fundamental element of art associated with emotional valence [31,32,33]. The first analysis investigated how the lightness of paintings changed over time, revealing an interesting U-shape, corresponding to global temperature patterns. ...
This paper examines the influence of climate change on the human mind and culture from the 13th century to the 21st century. By quantitatively analyzing 100,000 paintings and the biological data of over 2,000 artists, an interesting U-shaped pattern in the lightness of paintings was found, which correlated with trends in global temperature. Event study analysis revealed that when an artist is subjected to a high-temperature shock, their paintings become brighter in later periods. Moreover, the effects are more pronounced in art genres that rely less on real things and more on the artist's imagination, indicating the influence of artists' minds. Overall, this study demonstrates the significant and enduring influence of climate on the human mind and culture over centuries.
... Patterned tiles are preferred less than unpatterned tiles, which may be because the unpatterned tiles look cleaner and neater (Agost and Vergara, 2014). Jonauskaite et al. found that people prefer neutral colors less, which may be because neutral colors appear to be less chromatic and tend to be more negative (Jonauskaite et al., 2019). Therefore, we suggested that participants preferred warm tones, possibly because warm tones are usually associated with positivity and can create a warm and cozy perception of the environment. ...
Background
Ceramic tiles are popular because of their various forms, and they are often used to decorate the environment. However, few studies have applied objective methods to explore the implicit preference and visual attention of people toward ceramic tile features. Using event-related potential technology can provide neurophysiological evidence for the study and applications of tiles.
Materials and methods
This study explored the influence of pattern, lightness, and color system factors of ceramic tiles on the preferences of people using a combination of subjective questionnaires and event-related potential (ERP) technology. Twelve different conditions of tiles (2 × 3 × 2) were used as stimuli. EEG data were collected from 20 participants while they watched the stimuli. Subjective preference scores and average ERPs were analyzed using analysis of variance and correlation analysis.
Results
(1) Pattern, lightness, and color system factors significantly affected the subjective preference scores for tiles; the unpatterned tiles, light-toned tiles, and warm-colored tiles received higher preference scores. (2) The preferences of people for different features of tiles moderated ERP amplitudes. (3) The light-toned tiles with a high preference score caused a greater N100 amplitude than the medium-toned and dark-toned tiles; and the patterned tiles and warm-colored tiles with low preference scores induced greater P200 and N200 amplitudes.
Discussion
In the early stage of visual processing, light-toned tiles attracted more attention, possibly because of the positive emotional effects related to the preference. The greater P200 and N200 elicited by the patterned and neutral-colored tiles in the middle stage of visual processing indicates that patterned and neutral-colored tiles attracted more attention. This may be due to negativity bias, where more attention is allocated to negative stimuli that people strongly dislike. From the perspective of cognitive processes, the results indicate that the lightness of ceramic tiles is the factor that people first detect, and the visual processing of pattern and color system factors of ceramic tiles belong to a higher level of visual processing. This study provides a new perspective and relevant information for assessing the visual characteristics of tiles for environmental designers and marketers involved in the ceramic tiles industry.
... Most studies about the influence of colors on people are based on associative learning theory, which proposes that meanings of colors are developed by people frequently associating colors with the common objects of the colors in a culture (Mehta and Zhu, 2009). Based on associative learning theory, people's responses to a particular color are heavily culture-laden since common objects of the color may contain different meanings (Sakaki et al., 2014;Jonauskaite et al., 2019). In this sense, associative learning theory is limited in explaining the common use of blue in the Chinese market, which is commonly perceived as a culture that favors red. ...
Many international firms hold a common stereotype about Chinese consumers’ color preference: culturally, red is their favorite color. However, many international firms (e.g., P&G, Ford, and Wal-Mart) do not use red as their theme colors when they run business in the Chinese market. To explain this interesting phenomenon, this study conducted three which include one IAT experiment and two scenari-based experiments to reveal less culture-laden influences of colors on people by examining the mediating effects of perceived spaciousness between colors and purchase intention. The results show that blue walls of a room make the room look more spacious than red ones and eventually increase consumers’ purchase intention. The perceived spaciousness is caused by the fact blue objects are perceived more distant than red ones. The findings indicate that culturally favorable color may not always be the most effective tool to increase consumers’ purchase intention. Hence, international firms should be extremely cautious when selecting a theme color in foreign markets.
This study investigates the effects of color contrast and sound conditions on user reaction time in virtual environments, with a focus on providing data-driven insights for optimizing user performance in gamified settings. Specifically, we explore how various combinations of sound (full, partial, none) and background color dominance (red, green, blue, neutral) influence reaction times. By analyzing data from a reaction-time-based game, we identify key findings such as the optimal sound condition for male participants being full sound, while females performed best with no sound. Additionally, background color dominance-particularly green-dominant backgrounds-was found to significantly impact reaction times, with green backgrounds yielding slower performance, especially under partial sound conditions. We further analyzed the interaction between target and background color dominance, discovering that the combination of green-dominant backgrounds and targets led to the highest number of outliers in reaction times. Our findings contribute to the development of user-friendly virtual environments, providing practical recommendations for enhancing user performance through the strategic use of auditory and visual stimuli. The results highlight how manipulating sensory factors, such as sound and color contrast, can optimize user performance, ensuring a more engaging and efficient user experience in virtual reality and gaming applications.
Edward Hopper’s Hotel Room (1931) skillfully captures the alienation of modern urban life and the evolving role of women through its palette, composition, and realist techniques. This essay situates the work within its historical context, exploring its commentary on the societal anxieties of the Great Depression, the transformative impact of urbanization, and the emergence of the independent “New Woman” during the first wave of feminism. Aside from an historical approach, this study analyzes the artistic formal qualities of the painting to reveal how Hopper constructs a narrative of isolation and emotional detachment. Interweaving artistic expression with social observation, Hopper’s Hotel Room serves both as a reflection of 20th-century American modernity and a critique of its psychological toll on individuals.
The Roerich family is a remarkable phenomenon in the cultural history of Russia and India of the 20 th century. Nicholas Roerich was a great artist, thinker, traveller, and the founder of the international Agreement on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments signed by the 22 countries of Northern and Southern Americas in 1935. Helena Roerich was a unique philosopher of cosmism who contributed to the creation of Living Ethics philosophical system. Elder son George was a well-known Orientalist, and younger brother Svetoslav was an artist and an art theorist. The art of this family a shared heritage of Russia and India. Although the artistic legacy of the Roerichs has been investigated from a variety of angles for the past almost one hundred years of Roerichology, it is rather surprising that the question of the philosophy of colour has been neglected. In the given article the question of the philosophy of colour will be considered primarily from the point of view of Living Ethics as well as from the point of view of the literary legacy of Nicholas and Svetoslav Roerichs. And, of course, we take into account the paintings of the Roerichs, both the father and the son, as their paintings speak for themselves.
Colour is an integral part of natural and constructed environments. For many, it also has an aesthetic appeal, with some colours being more pleasant than others. Moreover, humans seem to systematically and reliably associate colours with emotions, such as yellow with joy, black with sadness, light colours with positive and dark colours with negative emotions. To systematise such colour–emotion correspondences, we identified 132 relevant peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1895 and 2022. These articles covered a total of 42,266 participants from 64 different countries. We found that all basic colour categories had systematic correspondences with affective dimensions (valence, arousal, power) as well as with discrete affective terms (e.g., love, happy, sad, bored). Most correspondences were many-to-many, with systematic effects driven by lightness, saturation, and hue (‘colour temperature’). More specifically, (i) LIGHT and DARK colours were associated with positive and negative emotions, respectively; (ii) RED with empowering, high arousal positive and negative emotions; (iii) YELLOW and ORANGE with positive, high arousal emotions; (iv) BLUE, GREEN, GREEN–BLUE, and WHITE with positive, low arousal emotions; (v) PINK with positive emotions; (vi) PURPLE with empowering emotions; (vii) GREY with negative, low arousal emotions; and (viii) BLACK with negative, high arousal emotions. Shared communication needs might explain these consistencies across studies, making colour an excellent medium for communication of emotion. As most colour–emotion correspondences were tested on an abstract level (i.e., associations), it remains to be seen whether such correspondences translate to the impact of colour on experienced emotions and specific contexts.
Tree canopy landscapes are an important component of urban forests and have the potential to influence human emotions. However, their influence on emotional responses remains unclear. The aims of this study were: (1) to determine whether the canopy landscape affects human emotions; (2) to clarify the influence of canopy landscape on individual emotional indicators; and (3) to identify the ratio of canopy landscape elements with the most beneficial effects on human emotions. Different canopy landscape images were generated, and the self-reported emotions and neural activity of the subjects assessed before and after they viewed the images. The results of the statistical analysis were intuitively displayed by a ternary phase diagram. We found that the canopy landscape affected human emotions and different proportions of canopy landscape elements led to significant differences in excitement, depression and confusion. Higher proportions of blue elements and lower proportions of green and other elements characterized the canopy landscape with the most beneficial effect on human emotions. These findings will promote further research on canopy landscapes, inform the planning and design of urban forests, and contribute to the field of landscape architecture.
In experimental color research, one must ensure that color is displayed and described reliably. When monitors are involved, colors are displayed through device-dependent color systems. However, these values must be translated into device-independent color systems to interpret what people perceive, often involving techniques such as gamma correction. We sought to explore the feasibility of estimating gamma instead of relying on direct gamma measurements, which typically require specialized equipment like a chromameter. Potential solutions include a computerized perception-based gamma estimation task or adopting the industry-standard gamma value of 2.2. We compared these two solutions against the chromameter measurements in the context of a color-matching task. Thirty-nine participants visually matched red, yellow, green, and blue physical objects using a computerized color picker. Starting from these color choices, we applied two RGB-to-CIELab color conversion methods: one using a perception-based gamma estimation and another using the industry-standard gamma. Color values obtained with the chromameter differed from the other two methods by 6-15 JNDs. Small differences existed between the results obtained using the perception-based task and the industry-standard gamma. Thus, we conclude that when standard viewing conditions cannot be assumed, adopting a gamma value of 2.2 should suffice.
This study explores the variety of basic colors in the Javanese
language and aims to elucidate their meanings using the Natural
Semantic Metalanguage Theory. Employing a qualitative research
paradigm, data were collected from various sources, including
Indonesian and Javanese dictionaries, LCC Indonesian 2022 and LCC Javanese corpus from CQPWeb. The study identifies 10 basic colors in Javanese, namely Ireng (black), Putih (white), Abang (red), Ijo (green), Kuning (yellow), Biru (blue), Soklat (brown), Wungu (purple), Jambon (pink), and Klawu (gray), while Indonesian has only six basic colors: Hitam (black), Putih (white), Merah (red), Kuning (yellow), Hijau (green), and Biru (blue). Utilizing the features of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory and the Basic Color Term approach by Berlin and Kay, the study analyzes the Javanese colors. The research highlights differences in color explications between Javanese and Indonesian, stemming from variances in using semantic atoms to explain color meanings. For instance, in Javanese, the color black is explicated using a spice herb named "temuireng" and yam, while in Indonesian, it is explained using charcoal. Additionally, certain secondary colors in Indonesian, such as Brown, Purple, Pink, and Grey, are considered basic colors in Javanese. The findings contribute to the advancement of color studies in semantics.
It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation. We assessed participants' physiological responses (i.e. arousal) with heart rate and skin conductance measures, and their self-reported levels of valence and arousal in response to the coloured environments. The results revealed physiological effects of lightness and hue. When compared with the baseline measures, heart rate increased, and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark than the medium lightness rooms. Both measures signalled higher arousal in the darker room, irrespective of hue. Also, when compared with the baseline measures, skin conductance increased more in the red than the blue rooms, again signalling higher arousal in the red condition. The difference between the red and the blue conditions was detectable only on some saturation and lightness combinations. We conclude that being immersed in environments of different colours can change physiological arousal. However, not all changes are driven by hue and not all the effects are measurable on all physiological parameters.
Duygusal aracılık hipotezi, insanların müzik-renk arasında eşleşmeler yaptıklarında müziğin duygusal çağrışımlarına uygun renklerin seçildiğini savunur. Bu araştırmada klasik batı müziği piyano eserleri ile ilgili müzik-renk ve müzik-duygu çağrışımlarının belirlenerek duygusal aracılık hipotezinin test edilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Çalışma Ordu Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi’nin farklı anabilim dallarında öğrenim gören 151 öğrenci üzerinde yürütülmüştür. Çalışmada son-test tek gruplu deneme öncesi desen kullanılmıştır. Deneysel işlemde katılımcılara Mozart (Majör tonunda/hızlı tempoda), Beethoven (Minör tonunda/hızlı tempoda) ve Chopin’in (Minör tonunda/yavaş tempoda) piyano eserleri dinletilmiştir. Katılımcılar dinledikleri her bir eseri yakın üç renkle ve en yakın üç duyguyla eşleştirmişledir. Katılımcıların renkleri seçmesi için 37 renkten oluşan bir kartela kullanılmıştır. Duygular için mutlu/üzgün, huzurlu/gergin, güçlü/zayıf olmak üzere 6 duygu durumu sunulmuştur. Verilerin analizinde betimsel istatistik yöntemlerinden yararlanılmıştır. Elde edilen verilerin duygusal aracılık hipotezini desteklediği söylenebilir. Katılımcıların seçtikleri renkler ve duygu durumları dinlenen müziklerin ton ve hızlarına göre farklı dağılımlar göstermektedir. Ayrıca sonuçlar müzik-renk ve müzik-duygu çağrışımları dağılımının alanyazındaki çalışmalar ile örtüştüğünü göstermektedir.
Purpose
This paper aims to theorize and investigate the use of effective color features in artificial intelligence (AI) influencers, an emerging marketing trend in the social media context.
Design/methodology/approach
By analyzing 6,132 pictures posted by ten AI influencers on Instagram, this paper examines the effect of warm colors in AI influencers’ social media posts on consumer responses, and how other color features may moderate the effect of warm color. In addition, two experimental studies reveal the underlying process driving the effect of warm color.
Findings
Warmer color generated more favorable consumer responses, with brightness significantly moderating the relationship between warm color and favorable consumer responses. Moreover, the results of the experiments establish that perceived warmth and emotional trust mediate the causal effect of warm colors on consumer responses.
Research limitations/implications
There is still little understanding about consumer perceptions of AI influencers and their acceptance of AI influencers’ product recommendations. As such, this research offers theoretical understanding of the color features influencing the effectiveness of recommendations by AI influencers.
Practical implications
Brands have started deploying AI influencers as their brand ambassadors to make product recommendations, representing a new wave of advertising on social media. The findings will thus benefit marketers in developing effective product recommendations using AI influencers.
Originality/value
The present research provides a novel understanding of how visual features, such as color can influence the effectiveness of AI influencers.
Color is a powerful communication tool that may be used from an early age to convey activity, modify emotion, and even influence psychological responses. Colors are efficient in evoking various emotions and capturing their attention. Color also has an important effect on the cognitive development of young students, and it influences intentions, performance, and emotional processes. Therefore, colors are used as an important medium to aid teaching. In HCI, digital content consists of colored texts, colored images, and other visual elements that serve as a platform for interaction. Previous studies have demonstrated indisputably the association between positive/negative perception and color, but a significant area that has not yet been investigated is how children associate color with emotions in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). In order to get an understanding of how children perceive color in the context of emotions in a collaborative setting, the researchers in this study invited students to use an online platform to a pool of 60 students from different schools that allowed them to create color and emotion-based digital content. The results showed that students used a monochromatic color scheme primarily to establish their emotions.KeywordsChromatic perceptioncomputer supported collaborative learningHuman computer Interaction
Problem definition:
Moral distress (MoD) is a vital clinical indicator linked to clinician burnout and provider concerns about declining patient care quality. Yet it is not routinely assessed. Earlier, real-time recognition may better target interventions aimed at alleviating MoD and thereby increase provider well-being and improve patient care quality.
Initial approach and testing:
Combining two validated MoD instruments (the Moral Distress Thermometer [MDT] and the Measure of Moral Distress for Healthcare Professionals [MMD-HP]), the authors developed a novel mobile and Web-based application environment to measure and report levels MoD and their associated causes. This app was tested for basic feasibility and acceptability in two groups: graduate nursing students and practicing critical care nurses.
Results:
The MDT app appears feasible and acceptable for future use. All participants (n = 34) indicated the MDT app was satisfying to use, and 91.2% (n = 31) indicated the app was "very appropriate" for measuring MoD. In addition, 84.2% (n =16) of practicing nurses indicated the app fit either "somewhat well" (47.4%, n = 9) or "very well" (36.8%, n = 7) into their typical workday, and 68.4% (n = 13) said they were either "extremely likely" or "somewhat likely" to use the app daily in clinical practice.
Key insights and next steps:
Education about moral distress and its associated causes proved important to the MDT app's success. It is ready for future validity and reliability testing, as well as examining usability beyond nursing, longitudinal data monitoring, and possible leveraging to pre- and postintervention evaluation studies.
Sekolah Luar Biasa Yapenas Yogyakarta merupakan yayasan yang memberikan fasilitas kegiatan pembelajaran anak berkebutuhan khusus yaitu anak autis, tuna daksa, tuna rungu dan tuna grahita. SLB Yapenas memberikan pembelajaran musik untuk meningkatkan kecerdasan dan keterampilan siswa baik kognitif, afektif dan psikomotor. Tujuan penelitian sebagai kajian pengelolaan pembelajaran musik di SLB Yapenas Yogyakarta sangat penting mengingat karakteristik pembelajaran yang berbeda dengan sekolah umum. Teori yang digunakan dalam kajian ini menggunakan teori kecerdasan majemuk. Metode penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian kualitatif dan diuraikan secara deskriptif analisis. Pengumpulan data penelitian menggunakan teknik observasi, wawancara dan dokumentasi. Penelitian ini melibatkan kepala sekolah, bagian kurikulum, guru kelas, guru musik dan siswa sebagai subjek penelitian. Hasil penelitian menunjukan pengelolaan pembelajaran musik yang sangat terstruktur, mulai dari mempersiapkan RPP dan silabus, media yang disesuaikan dengan karakteristik siswa, proses pembelajaran sampai dengan evaluasi siswa yang dikaji menggunakan kajian kecerdasan majemuk (multiple Intelligences). Kesimpulan dari penelitian diketahui bahwa pengelolaan pembelajaran musik di SLB Yapenas Yogyakarta sangat efektif sesuai dengan kompetensi dasar dan disesuaikan dengan karakteristik pembelajaran yang ada di sekolah luar biasa. Hasil dari evaluasi pembelajaran musik menunjukan kecerdasan majemuk yang dimiliki siswa SLB Yapenas Yogyakarta.
Dünyada güreş sporunun popüler bir spor dalı olması ulusal ya da uluslararası turnuvaları görsel şölenlere dönüştürmektedir. Günümüzde güreş spor kıyafet tasarımları bu şölenin bir parçasıdır. Yenilikçi tasarımlar bu kıyafetlerde hem görselliğe hem de yöresel kumaş kullanımı ile kültürlere önemli katkılar sağlamaktadır. Bu çalışmada Gaziantep yöresine özgü olarak üretilen kutnu kumaşları kullanarak kadın güreşçiler için güreş mayosu üretilmiştir. Üretilen bu kadın güreş mayoları için çeşitli desenler tasarlanmış ve bu desenler dijital baskı tekniği ile kumaşa aktarılmıştır. Çalışma kapsamında tasarlanan 6 farklı kadın güreş mayosu içerisinden seçilen bir tasarımın üretimi yapılmıştır. Böylece moda ve tekstil tasarımı alanında yöresel kumaşların Türk ata sporumuz olan güreşle harmanlanması ve bu alanda yeni bir değer oluşturulması amaçlanmıştır. Bu çalışmayla yöresel kumaşların spor dallarındaki giysilerde kullanımının yaygınlaştırılması ve geleneksel sanatlarımızın unutulmamasına katkı sağlamak hedeflenmektedir.
Designers are often called upon to design therapeutic spaces that serve people who are in fragile emotional and/or physical states. While there is considerable guidance on designing for function in these spaces, the evidence‐based guidance on aesthetics is virtually non‐existent, especially when it comes to color. For a long time, the prevailing assumption in these studies, and among the public in general, has been that hues are the drivers of emotional content (e.g., red is exciting and blue is calming) and they have, for the most part, disregarded the distinct emotional connotations of light, dark, and muted versions of a hue. This oversight has led to unfortunate outcomes in the real world. The idea that blue is calming, for instance, has paved the way for brand new state‐of‐the‐art facilities featuring light blue walls that occupants may read as cold and unwelcoming. Designers need a rational, evidence‐based approach that helps them understand what many of them already know intuitively: spaces can be calm and inviting without being blue. After an overview of the design process, this article proposes that Pleasure‐Arousal‐Dominance (PAD) theory may aid designers to better understand that pale and dark (high and low value) colors convey opposites messages related to strength/power (dominance), and that vivid and muted colors (high and low chroma) convey opposite messages about energy/activity level (arousal). Finally, the author illustrates how this thought process might be applied in an architectural design practice.
Emotional reactions to color hue, saturation, and brightness (Munsell color system and color chips) were investigated using the Pleasure–Arousal–Dominance emotion model. Saturation (S) and brightness (B) evidenced strong and consistent effects on emotions. Regression equations for standardized variables were: Pleasure = .69B + .22S, Arousal = − .31B + .60S, Dominance = − .76B + .32S. Brightness effects were nearly the same for chromatic and achromatic colors. Blue, blue–green, green, red–purple, purple, and purple–blue were the most pleasant hues, whereas yellow and green–yellow were the least pleasant. Green–yellow, blue–green, and green were the most arousing, whereas purple–blue and yellow–red were the least arousing. Green–yellow induced greater dominance than red–purple.
Colours carry social connotations like pink for girls and blue for boys. In a cross-sectional study, we investigated whether such early gender coding might be reflected in absolute colour preferences in children and adults of both genders. In two studies, participants selected their favourite (and least favourite, Study 2) colour from an unrestricted sample of colours. We tested 129 Swiss children (Study 1, 10–14 years-old, 68 boys) and 180 Swiss adults (Study 2, 17–48 years-old, 88 men). In children, we observed that girls chose pink/purple as their favourite hue more often than boys did, the most common favourite hue in girls and boys was blue, and boys chose red as their favourite more often than girls did. In adults, we observed that both genders almost never choose pink as their favourite, blue was a common favourite colour, and women were more likely to favour red than were men. In an additional study (n = 183 Swiss participants, 47 men), we tested whether liking of pink, blue, and red was related to emotion associations with these colours. Pink was associated with positive emotions to the same extent as blue and red. Women further associated more positive emotions with pink than did men. We conclude that some commonalities (blue) and gender differences (pink and red) exist in absolute colour preferences. These differences, however, cannot be fully accounted by emotional associations. We speculate about these gendered colour preferences in relation to gender stereotypes and status differences between men and women.
Free Link for 50 days: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691817302299
The present study investigates the hypothesis that brightness of colors is associated with positivity, postulating that this is an automatic and universal effect. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was used in all studies. Study 1 used color patches varying on brightness, Study 2 used achromatic stimuli to eliminate the potential confounding effects of hue and saturation. Study 3 replicated Study 2 in a different cultural context (Japan vs. Austria), both studies also included a measure of explicit association. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that brightness is associated with positivity, at a significance level of p < .001 and Cohen's D varying from 0.90 to 3.99. Study 1-3 provided support for the notion that this is an automatic effect. Additionally, Study 2 and Study 3 showed that people also have an explicit association of brightness with positivity. However, as expected, our results also show that the implicit association was stronger than the explicit association. Study 3 shows clear support for the universality of our effects. In sum, our results support the idea that brightness is associated with positivity and that these associations are automatic and universal.
Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.
Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of “pleasurable sadness” remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relationship between liking and felt sadness (r = 0.22) was fully mediated by feelings of being moved. Experiment 2 explored the interconnections of perceived sadness, beauty, and movingness in 27 short music excerpts that represented independently varying levels of sadness and beauty. Two multilevel mediation analyses were carried out to test competing hypotheses: (A) that movingness mediates the effect of perceived sadness on liking, or (B) that perceived beauty mediates the effect of sadness on liking. Stronger support was obtained for Hypothesis A. Our findings suggest that – similarly to the enjoyment of sad films – the aesthetic appreciation of sad music is mediated by being moved. We argue that felt sadness may contribute to the enjoyment of sad music by intensifying feelings of being moved.
Enjoyment of negative emotions in music is seen by many as a paradox. This article argues that the paradox exists because it is difficult to view the process that generates enjoyment as being part of the same system that also generates the subjective negative feeling. Compensation theories explain the paradox as the compensation of a negative emotion by the concomitant presence of one or more positive emotions. But compensation brings us no closer to explaining the paradox because it does not explain how experiencing sadness itself is enjoyed. The solution proposed is that an emotion is determined by three critical processes—labeled motivational action tendency (MAT), subjective feeling (SF) and Appraisal. For many emotions the MAT and SF processes are coupled in valence. For example, happiness has positive MAT and positive SF, annoyance has negative MAT and negative SF. However, it is argued that in an aesthetic context, such as listening to music, emotion processes can become decoupled. The decoupling is controlled by the Appraisal process, which can assess if the context of the sadness is real-life (where coupling occurs) or aesthetic (where decoupling can occur). In an aesthetic context sadness retains its negative SF but the aversive, negative MAT is inhibited, leaving sadness to still be experienced as a negative valanced emotion, while contributing to the overall positive MAT. Individual differences, mood and previous experiences mediate the degree to which the aversive aspects of MAT are inhibited according to this Parallel Processing Hypothesis (PPH). The reason for hesitancy in considering or testing PPH, as well as the preponderance of research on sadness at the exclusion of other negative emotions, are discussed.
Reactions to memorable experiences of sad music were studied by means of a survey administered to a convenience (N = 1577), representative (N = 445), and quota sample (N = 414). The survey explored the reasons, mechanisms, and emotions of such experiences. Memorable experiences linked with sad music typically occurred in relation to extremely familiar music, caused intense and pleasurable experiences, which were accompanied by physiological reactions and positive mood changes in about a third of the participants. A consistent structure of reasons and emotions for these experiences was identified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across the samples. Three types of sadness experiences were established, one that was genuinely negative (Grief-Stricken Sorrow) and two that were positive (Comforting Sorrow and Sweet Sorrow). Each type of emotion exhibited certain individual differences and had distinct profiles in terms of the underlying reasons, mechanisms, and elicited reactions. The prevalence of these broad types of emotional experiences suggested that positive experiences are the most frequent, but negative experiences were not uncommon in any of the samples. The findings have implications for measuring emotions induced by music and fiction in general, and call attention to the non-pleasurable aspects of these experiences
Humans like some colours and dislike others, but which particular colours and why remains to be understood. Empirical studies on colour preferences generally targeted most preferred colours, but rarely least preferred (disliked) colours. In addition, findings are often based on general colour preferences leaving open the question whether results generalise to specific objects. Here, 88 participants selected the colours they preferred most and least for three context conditions (general, interior walls, t-shirt) using a high-precision colour picker. Participants also indicated whether they associated their colour choice to a valenced object or concept. The chosen colours varied widely between individuals and contexts and so did the reasons for their choices. Consistent patterns also emerged, as most preferred colours in general were more chromatic, while for walls they were lighter and for t-shirts they were darker and less chromatic compared to least preferred colours. This meant that general colour preferences could not explain object specific colour preferences. Measures of the selection process further revealed that, compared to most preferred colours, least preferred colours were chosen more quickly and were less often linked to valenced objects or concepts. The high intra- and inter-individual variability in this and previous reports furthers our understanding that colour preferences are determined by subjective experiences and that most and least preferred colours are not processed equally.
The segmentation of visible electromagnetic radiation into chromatic categories by the human visual system has been extensively studied from a perceptual point of view, resulting in several colour appearance models. However, there is currently a void when it comes to relate these results to the physiological mechanisms that are known to shape the pre-cortical and cortical visual pathway. This work intends to begin to fill this void by proposing a new physiologically plausible model of colour categorization based on Neural Isoresponsive Colour Ellipsoids (NICE) in the cone-contrast space defined by the main directions of the visual signals entering the visual cortex. The model was adjusted to fit psychophysical measures that concentrate on the categorical boundaries and are consistent with the ellipsoidal isoresponse surfaces of visual cortical neurons. By revealing the shape of such categorical colour regions, our measures allow for a more precise and parsimonious description, connecting well-known early visual processing mechanisms to the less understood phenomenon of colour categorization. To test the feasibility of our method we applied it to exemplary images and a popular ground-truth chart obtaining labelling results that are better than those of current state-of-the-art algorithms.
A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.
The data includes measures collected for the two experiments reported in “False-Positive Psychology” [1] where listening to a randomly assigned song made people feel younger (Study 1) or actually be younger (Study 2). These data are useful because they illustrate inflations of false positive rates due to flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting of results. Data are useful for educational purposes.
Crossmodal associations may arise at neurological, perceptual, cognitive, or emotional levels of brain processing. Higher-level modal correspondences between musical timbre and visual colour have been previously investigated, though with limited sets of colour. We developed a novel response method that employs a tablet interface to navigate the CIE Lab colour space. The method was used in an experiment where 27 film music excerpts were presented to participants (n = 22) who continuously manipulated the colour and size of an on-screen patch to match the music. Analysis of the data replicated and extended earlier research, for example, that happy music was associated with yellow, music expressing anger with large red colour patches, and sad music with smaller patches towards dark blue. Correlation analysis suggested patterns of relationships between audio features and colour patch parameters. Using partial least squares regression, we tested models for predicting colour patch responses from audio features and ratings of perceived emotion in the music. Parsimonious models that included emotion robustly explained between 60% and 75% of the variation in each of the colour patch parameters, as measured by cross-validated R2. To illuminate the quantitative findings, we performed a content analysis of structured spoken interviews with the participants. This provided further evidence of a significant emotion mediation mechanism, whereby people tended to match colour association with the perceived emotion in the music. The mixed method approach of our study gives strong evidence that emotion can mediate crossmodal association between music and visual colour. The CIE Lab interface promises to be a useful tool in perceptual ratings of music and other sounds.
People associate affective meaning to colour and this may influence decisions about colours. Hue is traditionally considered the most salient descriptor of colour and colour-affect associations, although colour brightness and saturation seem to have particularly strong affective connotations. To test whether colour choices can be driven by emotion, we investigated if and how colour hue, brightness and saturation are systematically associated with bodily expressions of positive (joy) and negative (fear) emotions. Twenty-five non-colour blind participants viewed videos of these expressions and selected for each video the most appropriate colour using colour sliders providing values for hue, brightness, and saturation. The overall colour choices were congruent with the expressed emotion, i.e. participants selected brighter and more saturated colours for joy expressions than for fear expressions. Also, colours along the red-yellow spectrum were deemed more appropriate for joy expressions and cyan-bluish hues for fear expressions. The current study adds further support to the role of emotion in colour choices by 1) showing that emotional information is spontaneously used in an unconstrained choice setting, 2) extending to ecologically valid stimuli occurring in everyday encounters (dressed bodies), and 3) suggesting that all colour parameters are likely to be important when processing affective nonverbal person information, though not independently from each other.
The temporal relationship between our conscious intentions to act and the action itself has been widely investigated. Previous research consistently shows that the motor intention enters awareness a few 100 ms before movement onset. As research in other domains has shown that most behavior is affected by the emotional state people are in, it is remarkable that the role of emotional states on intention awareness has never been investigated. Here we tested the hypothesis that positive and negative affects have opposite effects on the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself. A mood induction procedure that combined guided imagery and music listening was employed to induce positive, negative, or neutral affective states. After each mood induction session, participants were asked to execute voluntary self-paced movements and to report when they formed the intention to act. Exposure to pleasant material, as compared to exposure to unpleasant material, enhanced positive affect and dampened negative affect. Importantly, in the positive affect condition participants reported their intention to act earlier in time with respect to action onset, as compared to when they were in the negative or in the neutral affect conditions. Conversely the reported time of the intention to act when participants experienced negative affect did not differ significantly from the neutral condition. These findings suggest that the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself is malleable to changes in affective states and may indicate that positive affect enhances intentional awareness.
Research in motivation and emotion has been increasingly influenced by the perspective that processes underpinning the motivated approach of rewarding goals are distinct from those underpinning enjoyment during reward consummation. This distinction recently inspired the construction of the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS), a self-report measure that distinguishes trait anticipatory pleasure (pre-reward feelings of desire) from consummatory pleasure (feelings of enjoyment and gratification upon reward attainment). In a university community sample (N = 97), we examined the TEPS subscales as predictors of (1) the willingness to expend effort for monetary rewards, and (2) affective responses to a pleasant mood induction procedure. Results showed that both anticipatory pleasure and a well-known trait measure of reward motivation predicted effort-expenditure for rewards when the probability of being rewarded was relatively low. Against expectations, consummatory pleasure was unrelated to induced pleasant affect. Taken together, our findings provide support for the validity of the TEPS anticipatory pleasure scale, but not the consummatory pleasure scale.
Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable: (1) when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2) when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3) when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated.
The GRID study has provided a wealth of new data of high relevance to understand the semantics of emotion terms. This data can be profitably applied to create new tools for emotion research, or to further develop the existing ones. Here, we illustrate one such application by describing how the GRID paradigm was used to improve and further validate a popular tool for emotion assessment, namely the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW), a self-report measure of feelings.
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.
The present study investigated children’s colour use in drawing tasks specifying single and mixed emotions. One hundred and eighty children (90 girls and 90 boys) between 4 years 11 months and 8 years 1 month (X = 6 years 6 month) participated. All children completed two test sessions in counterbalanced order. Session A measured emotional understanding and colour use in relation to a brief story. Children’s colour preferences were measured in Session B. Children used colours differentially across the drawing types and varied colour use in relation to depictions of other people and themselves using red and blue when depicting a protagonist with mixed emotions and red when depicting their own experiences of mixed emotion. The findings are discussed in terms of the need for caution when interpreting multiple and singular colour–affect associations in children’s drawings and the need to further investigate children’s understanding and non-verbal expression of mixed emotion.
Affect is a fundamental aspect of the human mind. An increasing number of experiments attempt to examine the influence of affect on other psychological phenomena. To accomplish this research, it is necessary to experimentally modify participants' affective states. In the present experiment, we compared the efficacy of four commonly used affect induction procedures. Participants (38 healthy undergraduate students: 18 males) were randomly assigned to either a pleasant or an unpleasant affect induction group, and then underwent four different affect induction procedures: (1) recall of an affectively salient event accompanied by affectively congruent music, (2) script-driven guided imagery, (3) viewing images while listening to affectively congruent music, and (4) posing affective facial actions, body postures, and vocal expressions. All four affect induction methods were successful in inducing both pleasant and unpleasant affective states. The viewing image with music and recall with music procedures were most effective in enhancing positive affect, whereas the viewing image with music procedure was most effective in enhancing negative affect. Implications for the scientific study of affect are discussed.
This article reviews research showing that music can alter peoples' moods and emotions. The so called “musical mood induction procedure” (MMIP) relies on music to produce changes in experienced affective processes. The fact that music can have this effect on subjective experience has been utilized to study the effect of mood on cognitive processes and behavior by a large number of researchers in social, clinical, and personality psychology. This extensive body of literature, while little known among music psychologists, is likely to further help music psychologists understand affective responses to music. With this in mind, the present article aims at providing an extensive review of the methodology behind a number of studies using the MMIP. The effectiveness of music as a mood-inducing stimulus is discussed in terms of self-reports, physiological, and behavioral indices. The discussion focuses on how findings from the MMIP literature may extend into current research and debate on the complex interplay of music and emotional responses.
In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. One possible answer to this question is that we may actually feel positive emotions when we listen to sad music. This suggestion may appear to be counterintuitive; however, in this study, by dividing musical emotion into perceived emotion and felt emotion, we investigated this potential emotional response to music. We hypothesized that felt and perceived emotion may not actually coincide in this respect: sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions. A total of 44 participants listened to musical excerpts and provided data on perceived and felt emotions by rating 62 descriptive words or phrases related to emotions on a scale that ranged from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). The results revealed that the sad music was perceived to be more tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music. Thus, the participants experienced ambivalent emotions when they listened to the sad music. After considering the possible reasons that listeners were induced to experience emotional ambivalence by the sad music, we concluded that the formulation of a new model would be essential for examining the emotions induced by music and that this new model must entertain the possibility that what we experience when listening to music is vicarious emotion.
Emotion research has become a mature branch of psychology, with its own standardized measures, induction procedures, data-analysis challenges, and sub-disciplines. During the last decade, a number of books addressing major questions in the study of emotion have been published in response to a rapidly increasing demand that has been fuelled by an increasing number of psychologists whose research either focus on or involve the study of emotion. Very few of these books, however, have presented an explicit discussion of the tools for conducting research, despite the facts that the study of emotion frequently requires highly specialized procedures, instruments, and coding strategies, and that the field has reached a place where a large number of excellent elicitation procedures and assessment instruments have been developed and validated. The Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment corrects this oversight in the literature by organizing and detailing all the major approaches and instruments for the study of emotion. It is the most complete reference for methods and resources in the field, and will serve as a pragmatic resource for emotion researchers by providing easy access to a host of scales, stimuli, coding systems, assessment tools, and innovative methodologies. This handbook will help to advance research in emotion by encouraging researchers to take greater advantage of standard and well-researched approaches, which will increase both the productivity in the field and the speed and accuracy with which research can be communicated.
We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study.
The Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW) is a measurement instrument for the self-report of emotional experience. It differs from instruments that require respondents to rate their feelings on a list of emotion words in that it organizes the emotion words to be rated in a theoretically justified two-dimensional system formed by the valence and power dimensions. 20 words are organized in a wheel-like format in this space, with opposite points of the spikes of the wheel representing the felt intensity. Different partially validated versions of the GEW have been widely used in research already. The GRID paradigm finally allowed determining the definitive location of emotion terms in the valence/power space. The chapter presents the results of an additional study and the most recent version of the GEW instrument.
The common approach to the multiplicity problem calls for controlling the familywise error rate (FWER). This approach, though, has faults, and we point out a few. A different approach to problems of multiple significance testing is presented. It calls for controlling the expected proportion of falsely rejected hypotheses — the false discovery rate. This error rate is equivalent to the FWER when all hypotheses are true but is smaller otherwise. Therefore, in problems where the control of the false discovery rate rather than that of the FWER is desired, there is potential for a gain in power. A simple sequential Bonferronitype procedure is proved to control the false discovery rate for independent test statistics, and a simulation study shows that the gain in power is substantial. The use of the new procedure and the appropriateness of the criterion are illustrated with examples.
Collections of colour samples are often used to provide examples of colour products. These may be in the form of patches of paint, swatches of cloth, pads of papers, or printings of inks, for example, according to the type of product involved. Such examples are very useful if the number of colours required is fairly limited. But, if a very large number of colours are necessary, and, if intermediate colours lying between samples are to be considered, a system is required in which interpolation can be made between samples in an unambiguous way. Such a system is referred to as a colour order system. This chapter describes the colour order systems such as Munsell system, Coloroid system, Optical Society of America (OSA) system, Hunter Lab system, Tintometer, and Pantone system. It also presents advantages and disadvantages of the colour order systems. paints
The aim of this study was to explore the feasibility of the Lüscher color test (LCT), a psychological instrument based on theory that colors are selected in unconscious way and that the color sensory perception of color is objective and universal. The research has involved 24 Ethiopian women, which delivered at the Getche Health Center in Gurage. It seemed to be relevant for the majority of Ethiopian women identify the rejected color (58.66%), the grey, than the favourite color, the yellow 33.33%). The yellow color suggests that they better express their personality in a physical context, while the grey color indicates that they want to live this experience intensely. This exploratory work lays the foundations for further studies in disadvantaged women, both in developing low-income Countries as well as in industrialized Countries characterized by an high level of emigration, and for clinical applications by the complete LCT version.
Whilst there are many anecdotal links between particular colours and particular emotions, there is relatively little in the way of systematic research. In this chapter a protocol is proposed for establishing these links empirically which is then tested on the emotional terms "pleasant", "unpleasant", "mood-enhancing" and "calming". It was found that it is possible to establish reliable colour-emotion associations, at least with culturally homogeneous participants. A framework for understanding these associations is proposed.
Colour studies attracts an increasingly wide range of scholars from across the academic world. Contributions to the present volume offer a broad perspective on the field, ranging from studies of individual languages through papers on art, architecture and heraldry to psychological examinations of aspects of colour categorization, perception and preference. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at a conference on Progress in Colour Studies (PICS08) held at the University of Glasgow. The volume both updates research reported at the earlier PICS04 conference (published by Benjamins in 2006 as Progress in Colour Studies volumes 1 and 2), and introduces new and exciting topics and developments in colour research. In order to make the articles maximally accessible to a multidisciplinary readership, each of the six sections following the initial theoretical papers begins with a short preface describing and drawing together the themes of the chapters within that section. There are seventeen colour illustrations.
Prior research has shown that non-synesthetes’ color associations to classical orchestral music are strongly mediated by emotion. The present study examines similar cross-modal music-to-color associations for much better controlled musical stimuli: 64 single-line piano melodies that were generated from four basic melodies by Mozart, whose global musical parameters were manipulated in tempo (slow/fast), note-density (sparse/dense), mode (major/minor) and pitch-height (low/high). Participants first chose the three colors (from 37) that they judged to be most consistent with (and, later, the three that were most inconsistent with) the music they were hearing. They later rated each melody and each color for the strength of its association along four emotional dimensions: happy/ sad, agitated/ calm, angry/ not-angryand strong/ weak. The cross-modal choices showed that faster music in the major mode was associated with lighter, more saturated, yellower (warmer) colors than slower music in the minor mode. These results replicate and extend those of Palmer et al.(2013, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci.110, 8836–8841) with more precisely controlled musical stimuli. Further results replicated strong evidence for emotional mediation of these cross-modal associations, in that the emotional ratings of the melodies were very highly correlated with the emotional associations of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the melodies ( r = 0 . 92 , 0 . 85 , 0 . 82 and 0 . 70 for happy/ sad, strong/ weak, angry/ not-angryand agitated/ calm, respectively). The results are discussed in terms of common emotional associations forming a cross-modal bridge between highly disparate sensory inputs.
Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion participants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categorically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, such facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valence, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger words). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word recognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word-naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the word-naming experiment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.
Recent research suggests that deliberate manipulation of expressive behaviours might self-regulate emotional experiences. Eighty people were first induced to adopt emotional expressions in a successfully disguised procedure that identified whether their feelings were affected by their expressive behaviour when they were unaware of the nature and purpose of that behaviour. They then deliberately attempted to change emotional feelings by adopting or inhibiting emotional behaviours, or by focusing on or being distracted from situational cues for emotion. Participants more responsive to their own behaviour in the disguised procedure felt more intensely when they adopted emotional behaviours, and less intensely when they inhibited those behaviours. In contrast, people identified as unresponsive to their own emotional behaviour were most affected by deliberate focus on or distraction from emotional thoughts. The effectiveness of techniques for emotional self-regulation depends on a match with characteristics of the person.
In this study, six colors (vivid red, vivid blue, vivid yellow, pale red, pale blue, and pale yellow†) were manipulated in a simulated study environment to determine their effects on university students' learning performance, emotions, and heart rate. It was hypothesized that learning, physiological and emotional states would be affected by different colors in private study spaces. A total of 24 undergraduate and postgraduate students participated in this study. The dependent variables were reading task performance, emotional responses, and changes in heart rate. The results showed that, although participants assessed the situation as relaxed, calm, and pleasant in the pale color conditions, reading scores were significantly higher in the vivid color conditions. Heart rates were significantly affected by hue; they increased in the red and yellow conditions. In addition, the results suggested that, regardless of the degree of whiteness, the hue had a significant impact on participants' emotions; blue increased relaxation and calmness feelings of participants compared to the other colors. Implications of these findings and suggestions for further research are discussed. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2015
Account information for over 1 million Twitter users was downloaded and analyzed to determine color preference. Blues were found to be the most preferred color, whereas greens were least preferred. Distinct gender-specific differences were found. Males preferred blues to a greater extent than females, whereas females preferred magentas to a much greater extent than males. Males preferred darker colors to a greater extent than women. Density plots within hue, saturation, and brightness space summarize the distribution of color choices and illustrate color preferences for both males and females. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 196–202, 2013.
Several procedures for the experimental induction of mood states have been developed. This paper reviews nearly 250 studies from the last 10 years which concern mood induction procedures. A classification system is introduced. According to the stimuli used to influence subjects, five groups of mood induction procedures (MIPs) are differentiated. The effectiveness of MIPs is analysed and compared. The Film/Story MIP and the Gift MIP proved to be highly effective in inducing elation. For the induction of depression, the Imagination MIP, the Velten MIP, the Film/Story MIP and the Success/Failure MIP can be recommended.
Abstract OBJECTIVE. To investigate unconscious dynamics in women pregnant with twins, using Lüscher's color test to objectively measure subjective color preferences, and compare them with women with singleton pregnancies. METHODS. The color test was administered to 50 Italian women with twin pregnancies and 100 women with singleton pregnancies. RESULTS. Both the twin and singleton pregnancy groups said that violet was their favorite color (50 vs 49%) and brown was their least favorite color (52 vs 44%), indicating that they idealized being pregnant, but also found it physically stressful. The twin pregnancy group chose yellow as their second favorite (28 vs 17%) and were most likely to combine it with their first choice of violet (44 vs 19%, p 0.0006), indicating that they were worried about their relationships with their new babies and wanted to give birth soon. In addition, both groups preferred form 6, the sine curve on a dark background, but rejected the associated brown color 6, revealing that the women felt the need to look after themselves. CONCLUSIONS. Both groups idealized being pregnant, but also found it physically stressful. However, the twin pregnancy group were afraid of building relationships with their babies and wanted to give birth soon.
G*Power (Erdfelder, Faul, & Buchner, 1996) was designed as a general stand-alone power analysis program for statistical tests commonly used in social and behavioral research. G*Power 3 is a major extension of, and improvement over, the previous versions. It runs on widely used computer platforms (i.e., Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4) and covers many different statistical tests of the t, F, and chi2 test families. In addition, it includes power analyses for z tests and some exact tests. G*Power 3 provides improved effect size calculators and graphic options, supports both distribution-based and design-based input modes, and offers all types of power analyses in which users might be interested. Like its predecessors, G*Power 3 is free.
Word associations or verbal synesthesia between concepts of color and emotions were studied in Gersnany, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the United States. With emotion words as the between-subjects variable, 661 undergraduates indicated on 6-point scales to what extent anger, envy, fear, and jealousy reminded them of 12 terms of color. In all nations, the colors of anger were black and red, fear was black, and jealousy was red. Cross-cultural differences were (a) Poles connected anger, envy, and jealousy also with purple; (b) Germans associated envy and jealousy with yellow; and (c) Americans associated envy with black, green, and red, but for the Russians it was black, purple, and yellow. The findings suggest that cross-modal associations originate in universal human experiences and in culture-specific variables, such as language, mythology, and literature.
Color data from the Osgood et al. 23-culture semantic differential study of affective meanings reveal cross-cultural similarities in feelings about colors. The concept RED is affectively quite salient. BLACK and GREY are bad, and WHITE, BLUE, and GREEN are good. YELLOW, WHITE, and GREY are weak; RED and BLACK are strong. BLACK and GREY are passive; RED is active. The color component Brightness, as determined by comparing data on WHITE, GREY, and BLACK, is strongly associated with positive Evaluation, but also with negative Potency. Eighty-nine previous studies of color and affect were analyzed. They generally support these findings, and, together with the fact that there are very few exceptions in our data or the literature, lead one to believe that there are strong universal trends in the attribution of affect in the color domain.
: A statistical analysis is made by use of the null hypothesis test for random samples which have been drawn from a population with the continuous distribution function F(x). It is useful for distributions on a circle since its value does not depend on the arbitrary point chosen to begin cumulating the probability density and the sample points. Sampling experiments on bird flight are plotted by use of an IBM 650 computer.