Do colors really affect us emotionally?

Short answer

Associating a color with an emotion is not the same thing as feeling that emotion: people around the world agree to a surprising degree in pairing red with anger and blue with sadness, but these pairings are usually measured through color words, and they don't show that actually seeing a color makes us angry. Experiments that actually show colors and measure emotional state and the body, on the other hand, find small but measurable effects; what's usually most decisive in these effects isn't hue, but the color's lightness and saturation.

Two different questions

In PS-01, we saw that color psychology conflates two different questions: what does a color remind us of, and what does a color do to us? In this lesson, we test that distinction against the field's most-cited studies.

The first question is association. When people are asked, "What color is anger?", what do they answer? The second question is effect. When we see a particular color in a room or on a screen, does our emotional state or our body change? The two questions don't have to give the same answer: most of us associate green with envy, but we don't feel envious when we look at a green wall.

Multi-country association studies

One of the most comprehensive answers to the association question comes from the thirty-country study published in 2020, which we briefly mentioned in TK-14. It's worth taking a closer look here at how it was done, because the method determines what the result actually means.

Participants weren't shown the colors themselves but twelve color words: "red," "blue," "brown," and so on. For each word, they marked how well it fit items on a list of emotions ranging from anger to joy, sadness to fear. In other words, the study didn't measure what the eye experiences in front of a color; it measured which emotion words the mind links to a color word.

This is exactly where the finding's strength and its limit both lie. Its strength is that it shows people in different parts of the world link color and emotion concepts in similar ways. Its limit is that this link is between concepts. Pairing the word "red" with the word "anger" doesn't show that a red light makes a person angry. Red's link to anger may be fed by the flushing face of someone who's angry, by patterns in language, or by both.

Showing the color, measuring the emotion

To test the effect question, you need to show the color itself and measure the person's state at that moment. One of the first experiments of this kind to draw attention was published in 1994. Valdez and Mehrabian used Munsell color chips to measure participants' emotional responses along three dimensions: pleasure, arousal, and dominance. The result was striking: rather than hue, lightness and saturation showed strong and consistent effects. Lighter colors were found more pleasant, more saturated colors more arousing; the effect of lightness was nearly the same for chromatic and achromatic chips.

The problem we saw in PS-01 shows up here too: many older studies compared color's three dimensions — hue, lightness, and saturation — without separating them. An experiment published in 2017 tried to correct this. Wilms and Oberfeld varied blue, green, and red independently across three saturation levels and three brightness levels, and showed 27 chromatic and 3 achromatic lights on an LED screen. Sixty-two participants looked at each color for thirty seconds and rated their emotional state at that moment; their skin conductance and heart rate were measured throughout.

The question on the lesson card: is association the same thing as feeling?

Is associating a color with an emotion the same as feeling that emotion? Read together, these studies say no, but there's also a bridge between the two fields.

Association studies show how color and emotion concepts are linked in our minds: red and anger, blue and sadness, and so on. Effect studies show that colors really do something, but that this doesn't speak the same language as the associations. In Wilms and Oberfeld's experiment, red turned out to be the most arousing hue; this fits red's association with "lively" and "energetic." But people who looked at a red light for thirty seconds didn't get angry; they just felt a bit more aroused, and their bodies responded accordingly. The effects sit not at the level of specific emotions like "red makes you angry," but at the level of general dimensions like "more activated" or "calmer," and their size is small.

That's why, when talking about a color's emotional effect, it helps to ask three questions. Was a word measured, or a color? Was an association measured, or a state in the moment? And did the color's hue change, or its lightness and saturation too?

Opposing view

Those who argue that colors meaningfully affect emotions point out that bodily measurements show this effect, and that even if the effects are small, they can accumulate in environments spent in for hours or days; they say that's why the colors of a hospital corridor, a classroom, or an office aren't trivial. They also note that associations themselves can be effective: if people believe a color is "calming," that belief can affect how they feel in that environment.

Skeptics, on the other hand, stress that the effects are small, that most experiments were conducted in laboratories, for short durations, and on specific screens, and that it's not known whether they carry over to real life. They add that many older studies were done with small samples and haven't been replicated; this problem is the subject of PS-06. On this view, a general sentence like "color changes emotion" is much stronger than today's evidence allows.

The common ground between the two views is this: measurable effects exist, but they're small, they operate at general dimensions, and a color's lightness and saturation usually say more than its hue does.

Example — the color of the face and emotion

One of the oldest links between color and emotion is found in the human face. The face of someone who's angry, embarrassed, or excited flushes; the face of someone who's afraid or ill turns pale. This bodily experience may play a part in red's association with anger and white's with fear.

A study published in 2018 examined this link directly. For six emotions — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise — participants themselves adjusted the color of a face or a simple shape by sliding it along two opposing color axes. The resulting pattern matched the physiological and psychological models of these emotions.

A limit of this finding must also be taken into account. The color change coming from blood flow in the face is perceived together with the skin's own color and lightness; the same degree of flushing can look different on light skin than on dark skin. Results about the relationship between facial color and emotion need to be tested separately with faces of different skin tones. A photographer, or an AI system, trying to infer emotion from a face's color may therefore not work with the same reliability for every skin tone.

Common misconception

Summary

1. Associating a color with an emotion is not the same as feeling that emotion; even though large cross-country association studies find shared patterns, what they measure is the link between color names and emotion names.
2. Experiments that actually show the color find that lightness and saturation affect emotional ratings and bodily responses more than hue does, and that the effects are small and operate at general dimensions.
3. The real-life size of these effects is contested; the link between facial color and emotion, meanwhile, needs to be tested separately across different skin tones.

Test yourself

1. (Easy) In the thirty-country study, were participants shown colors or color words?
2. (Easy) What do valence and arousal measure?
3. (Medium) Is associating a color with an emotion the same as feeling that emotion?
4. (Medium) In Valdez and Mehrabian's study, which color dimensions showed the strongest effect on emotions?
5. (Hard) Which weakness of older color–emotion studies did Wilms and Oberfeld's experiment try to address, and what did it find?
6. (Hard) Why might a system that tries to infer emotion from facial color not work with the same reliability across every skin tone?

Answers

1. Color words; for each color name, participants marked which emotions fit ("Multi-country association studies").
2. Valence measures how pleasant or unpleasant a state feels, arousal measures how calm or activated it feels ("Showing the color, measuring the emotion").
3. No. Association is the link between color and emotion concepts in the mind; experiments that actually show the color find small, general arousal and pleasure effects instead of specific emotions. For instance, people who looked at a red light didn't get angry, they felt a bit more aroused ("The question on the lesson card: is association the same thing as feeling?").
4. Lightness and saturation; pleasure was linked largely to lightness, arousal more to saturation ("Showing the color, measuring the emotion").
5. The weakness of comparing hue, lightness, and saturation without separating them; they varied all three independently. Saturated and bright colors led to higher arousal and stronger skin conductance responses, arousal increased from blue to red, and the effects also came from interactions among the three dimensions ("Showing the color, measuring the emotion").
6. The color change from blood flow in the face is perceived together with the skin's own color and lightness; the same flush looks different on light and dark skin. That's why this kind of relationship needs to be tested separately with faces of different skin tones ("Example — the color of the face and emotion").

Sources

• Jonauskaite, D., et al., "Universal patterns in color-emotion associations are further shaped by linguistic and geographic proximity," Psychological Science 31(10): 1245–1260, 2020.
• Valdez, P., and Mehrabian, A., "Effects of color on emotions," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123(4): 394–409, 1994.
• Wilms, L., and Oberfeld, D., "Color and emotion: effects of hue, saturation, and brightness," Psychological Research 82(5): 896–914, 2018.
• Thorstenson, C. A., et al., "Emotion-color associations in the context of the face," Emotion 18(7): 1032–1042, 2018.

Next step

GT-02 applies this lesson's finding that "lightness says more than hue" to typography: it looks at why a colored headline or body of text is read mainly through its lightness difference, how colors fade as the weight of the type gets thinner, and how two vivid colors placed side by side create an eye-tiring vibration. PS-06, meanwhile, questions how solid the evidence in this field is: it covers small samples, publication bias, preregistration, and uncontrolled color stimuli, through the lens of the replication crisis.