Relationships between colors and emotions are often universal, thinks study

Colors can be universally associated with certain emotions, a study has discovered.

Red is attached to love or anger, blue to sorrow or black to death, and similar ties seem to exist in other parts of the world.

Even where colors were not firmly attributed to a single emotion, they were almost all good or especially bad, regardless of where people lived.

But on a smaller, more detailed scale, there were nuances that researchers said they could use to predict from which country someone came.

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Almost all colors, even if they had no solid link to one emotion, were overwhelmingly good or bad – with the exception of red, which was linked to both anger and love, and purple and brown, which were neither. Positive colors were yellow, white, turquoise, pink, orange and green. Negative were gray and black

Scientists from the universities of Auckland, Lausanne in Switzerland and Johannes Gutenber in Mainz, Germany carried out their research on 711 people.

The participants all came from the UK, Germany, Greece or China and responded to assess how colors they felt.

The colors in the study were white, black, gray, red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple, pink, brown and turquoise.

They were shown to people in word form rather than images, because the research was done online and researchers need to be sure that screens display the same thing.

And people arranged how closely they related them to the following emotions: anger, interest, amusement, pride, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, admiration, love, relief, compassion, sadness, guilt, regret, shame, disappointment, fear, disgust , contempt or hatred.

The researchers, led by Dr. Daniel Oberfeld of Johannes Gutenber University, wrote: & # 39; Red is associated with both positive and negative emotions, while black is unambiguously associated with negative emotions.

& # 39; In the current study, red was often associated with love and anger, while black was associated with sadness, hatred, and fear in addition to other negative emotions. & # 39;

Other colors that had strong associations in different countries were pink with love, gray with disappointment or sadness, and orange with joy or pleasure.

Some other colors, however, had more nuanced associations.

For example, people in Greece often associated turquoise with relief and purple with sadness than people in other countries.

While people in the UK and Germany strongly associated yellow with joy, Greeks and Chinese did not feel the same link.

Almost all colors, even if they had no solid link to one emotion, were overwhelmingly good or bad – with the exception of red, which was linked to both anger and love, and purple and brown, which were neither.

Positive colors were yellow, white, turquoise, pink, orange and green. Negative were gray and black.

Black and red were the colors with the strongest emotional connections – black was closely linked to sadness and fear, while red was linked to love and anger

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Some colors had more general associations: green was overwhelmingly positive but not tied to a single emotion, while yellow had a niche link to joy that was most strongly seen in the UK and Germany (second and third level) but not in Greece or China

Dr. Oberfeld's team added: & # 39; Especially strong color-emotion associations were observed for red, black, and pink, and particularly weak associations were observed for brown and purple.

& # 39; Of the 240 color-emotion pairs, the strongest connection was found between the love of emotion and the color term red.

& # 39; Here the bar chart shows that if this association was reported, it tended to be strong, that is, rating category 5 … was the most selected. & # 39;

The research is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.