Blue hues don't bring the blues: Questioning conventional notions of color-emotion associations

Schloss, Karen, Witzel, Christoph and Lai, Leslie Y. (2020) Blue hues don't bring the blues: Questioning conventional notions of color-emotion associations. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 37 (5), 813-824. (doi:10.1364/JOSAA.383588).

Record type: Article

Abstract

It is commonly held that yellow is happy and blue is sad, but the reason remains unclear. Part of the problem is that researchers tend to focus on understanding why yellow is happy and blue is sad, but this may be a misleading characterization of color-emotion associations. In this study,we disentangle the contribution of lightness, chroma, and hue in color-happy/sad associations by controlling for lightness and chroma either statistically or colorimetrically. We found that after controlling for lightness and chroma, colors with blue hue were no sadder than colors with yellowhue, and in some cases, colors with blue huewere actually happier. These results can help guide future efforts to understand the nature of color-emotion associations.

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Accepted/In Press date: 15 March 2020

e-pub ahead of print date: 16 March 2020

Published date: 1 May 2020

Additional Information: Funding Information: Funding. European Research Council (323674); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB TRR 135); University of Wisconsin–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Graduate Education; Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Optical Society of America.