Color fills our world. Color makes our visual landscape exciting, vibrant, and full of character. Color also has meaning that extends far beyond color.

Different cultures have associated meanings to different colors. Green, yellow, and red may be linked to traffic signals. Brown, orange, and yellow may indicate a seasonal change in nature. Universities are often identified by their color branding. Roses can have specific meanings based on color: red for love, yellow for friendship, white for purity, gray for… well, maybe that rose is dead.

When painting a room, how do you pick the color? Let’s say you’re drawn to blue. You walk to the paint section of your local home improvement store, and you’re faced with a wall of paint swatches. There could be hundreds of blues to choose from. How do you decide between royal blue, navy, indigo, sapphire, denim, blue-green, blue-gray, aquamarine, baby blue, or azure? The options are endless! Spend a few minutes clicking around the CSS Gradient tool for a swatch-picking nightmare. Ultimately, when we decide on a color for such a project, we may be following our instincts—or our emotional connection to that color.

How do certain colors change your mood? Does yellow make you happy? Is blue calming? Does orange get you excited? Researchers of color psychology have been investigating connections between color and emotion for a very long time. You can even explore these connections in this interactive Color Wheel of Emotions.

Domicele Jonauskaite and Christine Mohr, leading researchers at Colour Experience in Switzerland, recently completed a systematic review of these studies, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Jonauskaite and Mohr collected 132 peer-reviewed reports of empirical studies on color and emotion. These studies spanned 128 years—from 1895 to 2022. Altogether, the studies had a total of 42,266 participants across 64 countries.

The studies had unique ways to investigate colors and emotions—from stimulus presentation to analysis. In their review, Jonauskaite and Mohr gathered the most reported affective concepts that were associated with colors. There were many-to-many correspondences. For example, happiness was associated with 8 different color categories. The authors painted the connections in a visual web below.

Across the studies, there were common connections between colors and emotions. Here are some of the links the authors found:

• RED links to positive and negative, arousing, and high-power emotions (e.g., love, anger, passion)
• YELLOW/ORANGE link to positive and high arousal emotions (e.g., happiness, pleasure, fun)
• GREEN/BLUE/BLUE-GREEN link to positive and low arousal emotions (e.g., comfort, relaxation, happiness)
• WHITE links to positive and low arousal emotions (e.g., relaxation, hope, relief)
• BLACK/GREY link to negative, low and high-power emotions (e.g., fear, disappointment, anger)

Color dimensions can be defined in terms of lightness, saturation, and hue. The authors also found connotations between these features and affective terms. Lighter colors were tied to more positive emotions, while darker colors were more negative. Saturated colors were linked to positive, high arousal, and high power emotions, while desaturated colors were linked to negative, low arousal, and low power emotions. Regarding hue, cooler colors had more homogeneous affective terms, and warmer colors covered a wider variety of emotions.

Amazingly, these connections were pervasive across many years and many countries and cultures. The authors say these pooled results show that

“humans have remarkably consistent ways of linking colors to emotions. While each color can convey multiple emotions – like red signalling both love and anger – these associations follow systematic patterns based on lightness, saturation, and ‘color temperature.’”

These color associations have meaningful impacts on our world. Jonauskaite and Mohr are on the brilliant research team at Colour Experience, which offers consulting services in healthcare, art, technology, and more. With the ongoing research in color psychology, the public may continue to appreciate and embrace the beauty of color. To quote RuPaul, a colorful visionary herself: “Life is about using the whole box of crayons.”

Featured Psychonomic Society article

Jonauskaite, D., & Mohr, C. (in press). Do we feel colors? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colors and emotions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02615-z