{"id":552,"date":"2022-06-01T22:25:08","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T15:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bnsd.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/?p=552"},"modified":"2022-06-01T22:25:08","modified_gmt":"2022-06-01T15:25:08","slug":"why-links-between-colors-and-emotions-may-be-universal-and-the-enduring-debate-over-the-meaning-of-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/2022\/06\/01\/why-links-between-colors-and-emotions-may-be-universal-and-the-enduring-debate-over-the-meaning-of-red\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Links Between Colors and Emotions May Be Universal &#8230; and the enduring debate over the meaning of red."},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"blog_entry__key-points-title\">KEY POINTS<\/h3>\n<ul class=\"blog_entry__key-points-item-list\">\n<li class=\"blog_entry__key-points-item\">People often link colors and emotions in their languages. For example, \u201cseeing red\u201d means that someone is angry.<\/li>\n<li class=\"blog_entry__key-points-item\">Research shows that people across 30 countries found it easy to link colors and emotions, and those links appeared to be universal.<\/li>\n<li class=\"blog_entry__key-points-item\">People whose languages were more similar to each other had even more similar associations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-553 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/files\/2022\/06\/eliska-motisova-0xt-am7qnpg-unsplash.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"480\" \/>source photo by Eliska Mottsova on Unsplash<\/p>\n<p>In language, we easily link colors and emotions. English speakers\u00a0<em>see red<\/em>,\u00a0<em>feel blue<\/em>, or are\u00a0<em>green with envy<\/em>, meaning they are angry, sad, or\u00a0<a class=\"basics-link\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at envious\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/basics\/jealousy\">envious<\/a>, respectively. French speakers\u00a0<em>voient rouge<\/em>\u00a0(see red),\u00a0<em>ont une peur blue<\/em>\u00a0(have a blue\u00a0<a class=\"basics-link\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at fear\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/basics\/fear\">fear<\/a>), or\u00a0<em>ont un rire jaune<\/em>\u00a0(have a yellow laugh), meaning they are angry, extremely\u00a0<a class=\"basics-link\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at anxious\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/basics\/anxiety\">anxious<\/a>, or display a forced false laugh. German speakers\u00a0<em>sehen rot<\/em>\u00a0(see red),\u00a0<em>sind blau<\/em>\u00a0(are blue), or\u00a0<em>werden gelb vor Neid<\/em>\u00a0(turn yellow with envy), meaning they are angry, drunk, or envious, respectively. As one can see, some of these color metaphors repeat across languages, while others differ. In some languages, different colors might not only relate to different emotions but signal different intensities of the same emotion. In Lithuanian, the degree of\u00a0<a class=\"basics-link\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at anger\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/basics\/anger\">anger<\/a>\u00a0is coded through color\u2014as Lithuanian speakers become increasingly outraged, descriptions move from being white of anger, to red, to blue, and finally to black (i.e.,\u00a0<em>pabal\u0119<\/em>,\u00a0<em>paraud\u0119<\/em>,\u00a0<em>pam\u0117l\u0119<\/em>, or\u00a0<em>pajuod\u0119<\/em>\u00a0<em>i\u0161 pyk\u010dio<\/em>).<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-0\" data-slot-position=\"0\"><\/div>\n<p>The longer we perform our studies in affective color psychology, the more we get asked if such affective color metaphors are related to or are even at the origin of color-emotion associations. Thus, we decided to follow up on this question. Moreover, you can check if color-emotion associations in your language and for your country match the colorful sayings.<\/p>\n<h3>The International Color-Emotion Association Survey<\/h3>\n<p>To gain insight into color-emotion associations, we are running the broad-reaching and collaborative\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.colourexperience.ch\/ongoing-projects\">International Color-Emotion Association Survey<\/a>\u00a0(<a href=\"http:\/\/https\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/329399627_Unifying_research_on_colour_and_emotion_Time_for_a_cross-cultural_survey_on_emotion_associations_with_colour_terms\">Mohr et al., 2018<\/a>). If you click on the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www2.unil.ch\/onlinepsylab\/colour\/main.php\">link<\/a>, you will hopefully find the translation of the survey in your mother tongue.<\/p>\n<div id=\"block-adblock-18\" class=\"pt-ad pt-ad--300x250 d-block d-none d-md-block d-lg-block d-xl-block block\"><\/div>\n<p>In the survey, participants see 12 color terms (Table 1) and must choose one, several, or none of 20 emotion terms, arranged in the form of a wheel (see Figure 1). Emotion terms appear always at the same location. You probably already noticed some regularities in their arrangement. We will explain all of them, some being more obvious than others. In research, we speak of affective dimensions. The first one is\u00a0<em>valence<\/em>, ranging from the most positive to the most negative emotion. On the wheel, you see that similar emotions are placed next to each other with 10 positive emotions being on the right side and 10 negative ones on the left.<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-3\" data-slot-position=\"3\"><\/div>\n<p>Another dimension is\u00a0<em>affective power<\/em>, and on the wheel, 10 empowering emotions are located on the upper half, while 10 disempowering and immobilizing emotions are located on the lower half. Finally, there is also\u00a0<em>arousal<\/em>. On the wheel, there are 10 emotions that are activating (e.g., fear, amusement), while 10 others are calming (e.g., sadness, contentment). Since the wheel only has two dimensions (left-right and up-down), these emotions are spread around the wheel (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/280880696_The_GRID_meets_the_Wheel_Assessing_emotional_feeling_via_self-report\">Scherer et al., 2013<\/a>).<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.psychologytoday.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/image-article_inline_full_caption\/public\/field_blog_entry_images\/2022-02\/figure_1_0.jpg?itok=CTYibOgA\" alt=\"Figure by Alessia Garzilli for Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\" style=\"text-align: center\">Figure 1. Emotions presented as the wheel in our study (Jonauskaite et al, 2020) and the most common associations with colors.<\/div>\n<div class=\"subtext insertArea--origin\" style=\"text-align: center\">Source: Figure by Alessia Garzilli for Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">\n<h3>What Has the Survey Told Us So Far?<\/h3>\n<p>In one of the first publications, we reported the results from 30 countries and over 4,500 participants (<a href=\"http:\/\/https\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/344171453_Universal_Patterns_in_Color-Emotion_Associations_Are_Further_Shaped_by_Linguistic_and_Geographic_Proximity\">Jonauskaite et al., 2020<\/a>). These countries were located on all the continents but Antarctica. We studied many European countries as well as the U.S., New Zealand, Egypt, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, China, and others. We calculated the proportion of emotions selected per country for each color term and their average intensities.<br \/>\nHere are some major results.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.psychologytoday.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/image-article_inline_full_caption\/public\/field_blog_entry_images\/2022-02\/table_1.jpg?itok=EkGnkNXd\" alt=\"Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\" style=\"text-align: center\">Table 1. Most frequent color-emotion associations in 30 countries. Percentages show how many people chose each association.<\/div>\n<div class=\"subtext insertArea--origin\" style=\"text-align: center\">Source: Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr<\/div>\n<p><strong>First<\/strong>, all participants found it quite easy to link colors and emotions. This was particularly true for colors like red, black, or yellow. Other colors, like brown and purple, received fewer associations. Check Table 1 if you want to know which colors went with which emotions. We found that color-emotion associations were not one-to-one, but many-to-many. Participants did not select one emotion for a color, but often chose several emotions. In turn, different colors were linked to the same emotion, like pleasure, which was associated with red but also yellow, orange, pink, purple, and turquoise (check also Figure 1).<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-6\" data-slot-position=\"6\"><\/div>\n<p>What you can also see is that most colors were associated with positive emotions. Only brown, grey, and black\u2014that is, darker colors\u2014were associated with negative emotions. Red was the most controversial color in terms of valence. For some, it was a very positive color\u2014the color of passion, love, and desire. For others, it was a negative color\u2014the color of danger, anger, and hate. For even others, it was both positive and negative. What connects all these emotions and ideas is the fact that red is empowering, activating, and strong.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Second<\/strong>, we found few cultural differences. In other words, many color-emotion associations seemed universal. Most participants agreed that pink was associated with love and pleasure, yellow with joy and amusement, or that black was the saddest color. If you look at Table 2, you can see that all colors apart from purple showed a very high agreement across countries.<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-8\" data-slot-position=\"8\"><\/div>\n<p><strong>Third<\/strong>, if you are interested in cultural differences, we found some specificities too. For example, in addition to the universal associations of love and anger with red, Chinese participants also associated joy and amusement, while Nigerian participants additionally associated fear with red. Another example is the association between purple and sadness that only Greek participants chose. For others, purple was generally a positive color with very little agreement on the exact emotions associated with purple (which is reflected in Table 2). We can say that purple was the most controversial color of all!<\/p>\n<div id=\"block-adblock-16\" class=\"pt-ad pt-ad--300x250 d-block d-none d-md-block d-lg-block d-xl-block block\"><\/div>\n<p><strong>Fourth<\/strong>, participants whose languages were more similar to each other also had more similar associations. To arrive at this finding, we estimated the degree of linguistic similarity between two languages, which shows how related or unrelated they are. Perhaps, you might think that Spanish and Italian are quite similar, and this is true, because both of these languages belong to the Indo-European family and, within this family, they are part of the same Romanic language group. Other European languages, like English or Russian, are similar to Spanish and Italian because they all belong to the Indo-European language family, but they would have lower similarity scores than Spanish and Italian, because English and Russian do not belong to the Romanic language group. English is a Germanic language and Russian is a Slavic language. And then, languages from different language families, like English and Chinese, would have the lowest similarity scores. If you are keen on getting into the details of these distinctions, you can find the methodology behind the similarity estimations in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/http\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/sdata2018189\">J\u00e4ger\u2019s (2018)<\/a>\u00a0article.<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-10\" data-slot-position=\"10\"><\/div>\n<p><strong>Fifth<\/strong>, participants who lived geographically closer also associated colors and emotions more similarly. To arrive at this finding, we took into account geographical distances between two countries in kilometers. To give a concrete example of how geographic distances affect color-emotion associations, we refer to another publication on the association between yellow and joy (<a href=\"http:\/\/https\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/335937322_The_sun_is_no_fun_without_rain_Physical_environments_affect_how_we_feel_about_yellow_across_55_countries\">Jonauskaite et al., 2019<\/a>; also read about the study\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/https\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/blog\/culture-conscious\/202101\/is-the-sun-more-fun-in-egypt-or-finland\">here<\/a>). We found that many participants who lived in colder and rainier countries thought yellow was a joyful color, but this joyfulness decreased with a decreasing distance to the equator. The closer to the equator participants lived, the less likely they were to say that yellow is associated with joy. In fact, yellow was the most joyful for Finns, Icelanders, and New Zealanders while Egyptians did not agree with this association at all. These differences are likely to be present because of different associations with yellow. While yellow might remind of heat and drought in warm and dry countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, in countries like Bangladesh or Colombia, yellow is again the color of joy, as these countries are not only warm but also humid.<\/p>\n<div class=\"markup-replacement-slot markup-replacement-slot-11\" data-slot-position=\"11\"><\/div>\n<h3>What\u2019s Next?<\/h3>\n<p>By early 2022, we have extended our data collection further thanks to the help of over\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.colourexperience.ch\/collaborations\">100 local collaborators<\/a>. We now have data from nearly 90 countries and 12,000 participants (see the map below). The results we showed you here are just the tip of the iceberg and there are thousands of unanswered questions. For instance, we are interested in\u00a0<a class=\"basics-link\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at gender\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/basics\/gender\">gender<\/a>\u00a0and age differences, as well as looking at cultural variations in greater detail.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.psychologytoday.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/image-article_inline_full_caption\/public\/field_blog_entry_images\/2022-02\/map_counts_2022.02.08_ame.jpg?itok=lFoxl9fr\" alt=\"Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\" style=\"text-align: center\">World map of how many people participated in the International Color-Emotion Association Survey by February 2022.<\/div>\n<div class=\"subtext insertArea--origin\" style=\"text-align: center\">Source: Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Source<br \/>\nhttps:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>KEY POINTS People often link colors and emotions in their languages. For example, \u201cseeing red\u201d means that someone is angry. Research shows that people across 30 countries found it easy to link colors and emotions, and those links appeared to be universal. People whose languages were more similar to each other had even more similar [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/international.binus.ac.id\/graphic-design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}