World of colour emotion: what's colour emotion?

Definition of Colour Emotion

Colour emotion can be defined, in a simple fashion, as the relationships between colour and the viewer's psychological response.

A more complex definition is perhaps the relationship between colour stimuli and psychological responses in terms of both semantic associations and emotion words, considering the configurations and the context in a visual experience.

For example, when seeing a red colour, we may have impressions like: "that's a very warm colour", "how exciting the colour feels", "the colour feels heavy" or "the colour makes me feel tense".

The adjectives in these phrases, such as "warm", "exciting", "heavy" and "nervous", are some of the keywords for colour emotion, although these are not real emotion terms (for discussions see here). To understand what this really means, why not take some colour tests as demonstrated in the following.

Colour-Emotion Exercise

Click the button below to begin the test:

Note "warm" is not a real emotion term, but a semantic term for describing the association between colour and temperature. While "warm-cool" has been referred to as a "colour emotion scale" in earlier studies (e.g. Sato et al., 2000; Ou et al., 2004a-b), a more proper term should be used instead: "colour semantics". What follows discusses the differences between these two terms.

Colour Emotion vs. Colour Semantics

The term "colour emotion" has been incorrectly used during the past few years for studies into the relationships between colours and semantic words such as "warm" and "active". This mis-use led to great confusions, as "warm" and "active" are words for describing characteristics of colours, rather than human emotions. We may say "that is a warm colour", but we don't really feel warm because of seeing that colour.

For further clarifications:

Colour emotion concerns human emotions evoked when seeing specific colours. "Emotion terms" are those describing human emotions such as excitement, happiness and anxiety.

Colour semantics concerns meanings or semantic associations of colours. Studies of colour semantics normally use word pairs to describe specific characteristics related to colours, such as warm-cool, heavy-light and active-passive.

Stages of colour emotion studies Colour semantics research has started since early 20th century, with various names like "colour meaning", "colour association", "colour image", "colour imagery" and even "colour emotion". Perhaps the most widely recognised study of colour semantics, Kobayashi's "colour image scales" (1981), claims that there are 3 main dimensions of colour semantics: "warm-cool", "soft-hard" and "clear-greyish".

In 1997, when the Congress of the Association Internationale de la Coleur (AIC) was held in Kyoto, the term "colour emotion" started to emerge from the area of colour science, and has since become a term covering studies of both colour emotion and colour semantics. Unfortunately, most of the work labelled "colour emotion" between 1997 and 2005 should have been seen as colour semantics, including those by Sato et al. (2000) and by Ou et al. (2004a-b), as illustrated in the diagram on the right.

Major findings of colour semantics are summarised in here: single-colour semantics, colour-pair semantics and cross-cultural issues.

Two relevant subjects, colour preference and colour harmony, are discussed under headings single-colour preference and colour-pair harmony, respectively.

We have now entered the second stage of colour emotion research, i.e. the relationships between colour and real emotion. We invite those interested in this area to work together for either government grants or industrial projects. Any enquiries please don't hesitate to contact me:

References

Kobayashi, S., The aim and method of the Color Image Scale, Color Research and Application, 6, 93-107 (1981).

Ou, L., Luo, M. R., Woodcock, A., and Wright, A., A study of colour emotion and colour preference, Part I: colour emotions for single colours, Color Research and Application 29, 232-240 (2004a).

Ou, L., Luo, M. R., Woodcock, A., and Wright, A., A study of colour emotion and colour preference, Part II: colour emotions for two-colour combinations, Color Research and Application 29, 292-298 (2004b).

Sato, T., Kajiwara, K., Hoshino, H., and Nakamura, T., Quantitative Evaluation and categorising of human emotion induced by colour, Advances in Colour Science and Technology, 3, 53-59 (2000).