Written by Lola Clark
Edited by Justin Choi
Why is it that the majority of the world’s favorite color is a shade of blue? Why do we automatically associate red with passion or danger? For decades, researchers have studied whether our psychological responses to color are wired into our DNA or the result of our environment and lived experiences. Evidence increasingly points to the latter: our emotional responses to color are because of personal memories, object associations, and perceptual dimensions.
To understand how color affects our perception, it helps to understand how color itself is categorized. Perceived colors are defined in three measures. First, hue is a category of color based on the dominant wavelength of light, whether that's blue, green, yellow, red, or a blend. Second, saturation relates to the color’s purity, or how strong it is. Finally, lightness describes how light or dark a color is on the black to white scale.
The Ecological Valence Theory (EVT), developed by psychologists Stephen E. Palmer and Karen Schloss following their seven year study on human color preference, explains these patterns. EVT says that a person’s preference for color is determined by their combined affective responses to all objects and experiences associated with that color. Palmer and Schloss measured the Weighted Affective Valence Estimates (WAVEs) of various colors by calculating how much people liked or disliked the objects associated with them. They discovered that EVT could predict up to 80% of the variance in color preference averages, which outperformed older models. For example, the amount you like oranges, sunsets, or autumn leaves may influence how much you like the color orange. EVT also sheds light onto why blue is a universally liked color. It is overwhelmingly associated with clear skies and clear water– vital elements to human survival that have almost uniformly positive associations. Conversely, blue has incredibly few negative associations.
Additionally, in a systematic review of 132 peer-reviewed psychology articles focused on linking colors and emotions conducted by Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr, the idea that the lightness and saturation of various hues connect to certain emotions was strengthened. Concerning color, the studies included worked with two representations: perceptual and conceptual. Perceptual representations include defining them in terms of perceptual dimensions, such as chroma or lightness, while conceptual representations focuses on color terms. For emotions, the studies included concretized emotion in one of three ways: emotion words, emotion expressions, or felt emotions. Finally, studies were separated into those working with
discrete emotion terms such as fear, or affective dimensions such as valence. While most correspondences were many-to-many, meaning that multiple colors linked to multiple emotions and vice versa, there were some patterns that stuck out. Light and dark colors were associated with positive and negative emotions, respectively; red with empowering, high arousal positive and negative emotions; yellow and orange with positive, high arousal emotions; blue, green, green-blue, and white with positive, low arousal emotions; pink with positive emotions; purple with empowering emotions; grey with negative, low arousal emotions; and black with negative, high arousal emotions. Jonauskaite and Mohr’s findings show that while each person has their own experiences with color, general trends emerge with a large enough population.
Despite evidence that color associations are learned or ecologically driven, a persistent misconception is that colors exert a direct influence on human emotion and behavior. This idea gained widespread attention in the late 1970s through research by Alexander Schauss, along with naval officers Gene Baker and Ron Miller. They introduced a specific shade known as Baker-Miller Pink, and claimed that it could be used “to reduce potential or actual aggression.” His inaccurate research led many prisons to paint specific cells pink during the 1980s, fueling the widespread misbelief that colors can induce emotions. The results of the study were later invalidated when the results couldn’t be replicated, but the misconception had already taken root.
Ultimately, colors do not directly control our feelings. Instead, our mind assigns meaning to hues, saturations, and lightness based on the world around us. It's the experiences and history that we connect to colors that impact how colors influence our emotions, and by separating myths from evidence, we can further understand how environmental context and human experience color the way we view the world.
Lola Clark ’30 is in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be reached at lc2349@cornell.edu
