THE INFLUENCE OF COLORS AND IMPACT TO EMOTIONS

Psychologically, every human, or animals relates to colors as it appears to them – almost like a chemistry. Many researchers for centuries, develop interests for a methodological approach to investigate: colors reactions as functions of personality, psychological reactions to color, color preferences, color effects to emotions, color effect on behaviors and the reaction to color concepts.  

  But for the sake of relevance to my points, I will throw more lights to: how colors influence our emotions.           

  Boyatzis and Varghese, Jacobs and Suess (1975) investigated the effects of four primary colors (red, yellow, green, blue) projected into a large screen. Brightness and saturation levels of colors are not controlled, it is note worthy that higher state-anxiety scores where associated with red and yellow, For example, RED is used to indicate danger – warning signs, while yellow in the other hand as the most attractive is used for Taxi paintings on their vehicles which all indicates ‘state-anxiety’ because anxiety involves displeasure and high arousal than with the other primary colors (green and blue). Later findings resulted that (1) red and yellow where less pleasant than green and blue (2) red and yellow were more arousing than green and blue (yellow is happy, blue is sad).    

  The appearances of colors places a big role to the way we make our judgements, often in the market, when we buy products we may prefer to look out for the most colourful packaged products than the contents of any other of identical products because we choose and rate appearance of something as it pleases the eyes and appeals to us emotionally.  

  While Lighter colors could portray happiness, gentleness, exciting, beautiful or stunning, darker colors will portray sadness, disgusts, or distressed (negative emotions). Color tones surprisingly explains little about color preference while yellow is the happiest color, yet it is among the least prepared while blue which is known to be linked to sadness is often preferred.    

The following identifies color commonly used to identify emotions 

1) YELLOW – Cowardice, Happiness or Caution 

2) RED -  Anger, embarrassment, lusts, and passionate 

3) GREEN – Disgusts, sickness, friendly, greedy 

4) BLUE – sadness, shyness and calmness  

5) BLACK – mournful or cold 

6) WHITE – Sick, mournful, shock or scared 

7) PINK – love, cherry or embarrassed   

 In Conclusion, this topic explains the influence of colors on our emotion, as I write this, color tone is ‘PINK’ which stands for ‘love’. I hope you learnt a thing from this short write-up. Please follow me for more @Evil Genius. Thanks