Relationship between color and emotion: a study of college students

College Student Journal, Sept, 2004 by Naz Kaya, Helen H. Epps

Despite a rapidly growing literature on the impact of color on our emotions and considerable interest in this research area, many studies have failed to use color samples from a standardized system of color notation (Boyatzis & Varghese, 1994; Hemphill, 1996; Terwogt & Hoeksma, 1995), while others elicited individuals' responses to verbal labels of color (e.g., "red", "blue") instead of using actual color stimuli (Hupka, Zaleski, Otto, Reidl, & Tarabrina, 1997). Furthermore, several studies have used color-emotion matching tasks (Zentner, 2001); matching colors (e.g., red, yellow, blue) to a certain number of emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger), which results in limited assessments of reactions to colors.

The purpose of the present study was to examine college students' color-emotion associations, referencing color samples from the standardized Munsell Color System and to investigate the reasons for students' emotional reactions to each color.

Method

Participants

The sample consisted of 98 volunteered college students (44 men and 54 women) at a public institution in the southeast. The mean age was 21 years (range = 18-25 years). None of the participants had defective color vision as verified with the Ishihara Color Deficiency test (1993).

Stimuli

Ten fully saturated chromatic colors were chosen from the Munsell Color System: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, yellow-red, green-yellow, blue-green, purple-blue, and red-purple. The Munsell notations are shown in Table 1. The color samples were prepared by using Freehand 10.0 software, in which Munsell color notations were available in that computer program. Apart from these ten hue groups, three achromatic colors (white, black and middle gray) were also used.

Procedure

Participants were tested individually in an office space where they were seated at a personal computer. Each color sample (10 cm _ 12 cm) was displayed in the middle of the computer screen one at a time on a neutral gray background, Munsell N/7. Order of presentation of the color samples was randomized across participants. Participants were asked, "What emotional response do you associate with this color? How does this color make you feel?" and "Why do you feel this way?" These questions were adapted from Boyatzis and Varghese (1994) and Hemphill (1996). Students were allowed to state only one emotional response for each color. Their answers were recorded on an observation sheet. Each experimental session lasted for about ten minutes.

Results

Data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software program. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize data. Based on the results obtained from the student's responses, a total of twenty-two emotions were gathered (see Table 2). Some of the emotions had the same meaning (e.g., empty, void) and some were overlapped (e.g., happy, happiness, joy), so they were grouped under the same emotion category. There was also a category for those responses that indicated no emotional response.