Colour impacts us in complex ways
Colour can impact us in many ways. It can affect us viscerally, impacting how we feel in ways we cannot fully describe with words. Colour is a pre-verbal sensory experience. We may have strong responses to colours, have various colour preferences, have emotional responses to colours, have associations with colours (which are likely influenced by our culture and environment) and use colour symbolically to communicate how we feel. Although we may strongly respond to certain colours, each colour (with all of its attributes) may elicit different responses in different people. Our experiential responses to colours are extraordinarily complex, and can depend on our past experiences, expectations, culture and environment, and may also change over time.
You may notice that sometimes colours can affect your mood or your emotions. Does vivid red make you angry? Maybe vivid yellow makes you angry instead. Or maybe vivid red makes you happy. Certain reds are soothing to some people. Our human relationship with colour is complex, and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ connection between specific colours and emotions, which applies universally to all people, across all cultures.
There have been many studies devoted to how specific colours impact our emotions, and the findings are complex. The general conclusion regarding the impact of colours on our felt emotions is that our experiences of colour are highly individual, mediated by our personal histories and experiences, as well as by our culture. There are no simple universal colour responses found for all people, across all cultures. Lists of colour meanings, associations and supposedly universal responses to certain colours abound. These types of associations can lead to misconceptions such as colours have universal meanings.
We can be attentive to our own personal responses to colours - some colours may make us joyful, or calm, or melancholy, or invigorated, or agitated, or leave us feeling indifferent.
The way that colour intertwines with various aspects of our emotions is multi-faceted. We have preferences for certain colours, which can be influenced by our culture, and change over time. We associate certain emotions with colours. These associations have been studied by researchers from the Colour Experience Lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, who have found certain associations like reds with anger, and yellows with joy, are found by a number of people across several cultures (links to their studies are found below). These types of associations can be helpful for designers when using colour as a communication tool. However, our physiological responses to colours are more complex than these conceptual associations: we do not feel angry when we look at something which is coloured red, but we conceptually understand that a vivid red can be used to symbolize anger, depending on the context. The same vivid red could also be used to symbolize love, in a completely different context.
FIND OUT MORE:
Blog entries published in Psychology Today by researchers from the Colour Experience Lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, who are undertaking a rigorous approach using scientific methods to study our emotional associations with colours, and how colour affects us. They have an extensive list of publications (for both researchers and the general public), as well as talks and podcasts in several languages.
Other references of interest:
Research on Facial expressions, colours and basic emotions, by Osvaldo da Pos and Paul Green-Armytage.
Research on How our colour preferences change with time, by E.D. Strauss, K. B. Strauss & S.E. Palmer.
Jonauskaite, D., Thalmayer, A. G., Müller, L., & Mohr, C. (2021). What does your favourite colour say about your personality? Not much. Personality Science, 2, e6297. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6297
