Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions

Abstract

Colour is an integral part of natural and constructed environments. For many, it also has an aesthetic appeal, with some colours being more pleasant than others. Moreover, humans seem to systematically and reliably associate colours with emotions, such as yellow with joy, black with sadness, light colours with positive and dark colours with negative emotions. To systematise such colour-emotion correspondences, we identified 132 relevant peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1895 and 2022. These articles covered a total of 42,266 participants from 64 different countries. We found that all basic colour categories had systematic correspondences with affective dimensions (valence, arousal, power) as well as with discrete affective terms (e.g., love, happy, sad, bored). Most correspondences were many-to-many, with systematic effects driven by lightness, saturation, and hue ('colour temperature'). More specifically, (i) LIGHT and DARK colours were associated with positive and negative emotions, respectively; (ii) RED with empowering, high arousal positive and negative emotions; (iii) YELLOW and ORANGE with positive, high arousal emotions; (iv) BLUE, GREEN, GREEN-BLUE, and WHITE with positive, low arousal emotions; (v) PINK with positive emotions; (vi) PURPLE with empowering emotions; (vii) GREY with negative, low arousal emotions; and (viii) BLACK with negative, high arousal emotions. Shared communication needs might explain these consistencies across studies, making colour an excellent medium for communication of emotion. As most colour-emotion correspondences were tested on an abstract level (i.e., associations), it remains to be seen whether such correspondences translate to the impact of colour on experienced emotions and specific contexts.

Keywords: Affect; Association; Colour; Cross-cultural; Emotion; Perception; Preferences.

Fig. 1

The flowchart showing the process of record screening and report selection complying with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines (Haddaway et al., ; Page et al., 2021)

Fig. 2

A The chronological order of the publication timeline of 132 articles studying colour–emotion correspondences, published between 1895 and 2022. B The chronological order of the number of citations received by the articles. Articles with 500 or more citations are labelled (see the interactive figure with all citations labelled here: https://www2.unil.ch/onlinepsylab/Figures/Review/Plot_citations_pub_years_interactive.html)

Fig. 3

Count of articles, which included each country in their dataset, pooled across single-country and multi-country articles. Bluer and darker colours indicate a larger number of articles. (Colour figure online)

Fig. 4

Colour correspondences with affective dimensions. A percentage of articles finding a correspondence between (A) valence (i.e., positive, negative), (B) arousal (high, low), and (C) power (high, low) and each colour category. See the number of articles corresponding to 100% for each colour category in Table 5. Significance from the chi-square tests coded as *p ≤ 0.050, **p ≤ 0.010, ***p ≤ 0.001. Note that we had low statistical power for some colour categories to detect differences due to a small number of articles. See supplemental material for studies reporting each correspondence

Fig. 5

A visual representation of the most frequent correspondences between affective concepts and 12 colour categories, allowing to see the many-to-many correspondences. Each correspondence that was mentioned in at least 15% of articles (see Tables 6, 7, 8 and 9) is visualised here. The nodes are coloured for visualisation purposes only and distances between nodes have no significance. (Colour figure online)