Kim Mills: Does your anger burn fiery red? When you’re sad, do you say that you’re feeling blue? Have you ever felt green with envy or purple with rage? English speakers are familiar with these color metaphors, all of which rely on linking color with emotion. But where do those links come from? Are they universal or do different cultures have different color-emotion associations? And can colors actually make you feel calm or sad or angry? Will painting the walls of your house blue help you feel calmer at home? Is there a reason that so many hospitals seem to be painted a particular shade of green? And is there any relationship to the notion that green is associated with feeling sick to your stomach?
Color psychologists are studying questions like these and others too. For instance, do people’s favorite colors tell us anything about their personality? Are there universal favorite colors? Are there gender differences in how people experience or describe color? Why do we associate pink with girls and blue with boys? And more broadly, how does color affect human cognition and emotion?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Domicele Jonauskaite, a senior research fellow at the University of Vienna in Austria. She is an experimental color psychologist who studies the links between color and emotion and cognition across cultures and individuals. She’s also interested in the role of color in aesthetics and art. In her work, she aims to use rigorous research to validate or debunk myths in color psychology. She has authored dozens of scientific articles and also writes a blog for the general public called Color Psychology.
Dr. Jonauskaite, thank you for joining me today.
Domicele Jonauskaite, PhD: Thank you for having me.
Mills: Are color associations universal? Do people around the world associate the same colors with the same emotion, or does it vary by country and culture? You’ve done some research in this area. Tell us what you’ve found.
Jonauskaite: So we actually wanted to know the same thing, are the links between colors and emotions universal? So we started the International Color-Emotion Association Survey, currently running in 80 countries. And we have it in 46 languages, which sounds like an amazingly big work to do. And we managed to collect data from over 15,000 participants. And now we kind of have an answer to this question, and the answer is yes, the links between colors and emotions are universal.
So wherever you go in the world, you will find that people associate red with anger and love, yellow with joy, black with sadness, and so on. And of course there are also some more culture-specific associations. For example, we know that red is a color of good luck in China. So on top of these universal associations, they also have some specific associations, like associating red with joy and amusement and more positive associations. So kind of our culture is shaping the universally based color-emotion associations.
Mills: And is that intrinsic or is it somehow learned, because many of us just exposed to these kinds of concepts?
Jonauskaite: Yes, so it’s not an easy question to answer because to know that, we would have to look at infants and they don’t really have the language for colors and the language for emotions. So what we see in infant studies is that there is an immediate reaction to color red. So the color red attracts attention and infants look at it longer. And we can assume that they prefer this color, but does it mean that they associate with emotions? We don’t know. And when we go to older participants, we start seeing that these associations are emerging as children are growing up and the older children get, the more diverse associations get, which is kind of showing that they are learning it over time by being in society.
And in fact here it fits in the research I’m currently conducting on blind participants, that even if people who have never seen color in their life—so they are blind from birth—they can still associate colors and emotions in a very similar way. So again, we’re talking about this universality and we are talking about the idea that color-emotion associations are learned.
Mills: I mentioned in the introduction some color phrases, like feeling blue when you’re sad or being green with envy. Do you have any favorite color metaphors from other languages or cultures that maybe would surprise English speakers?
Jonauskaite: Well, first of all, I wanted to comment on this feeling blue because this is the metaphor that only exists in English. So when we go to other languages, we don’t find it and we find that people think blue is a very positive color associated with calmness, contentment, relaxation—and even English speakers in addition to associating blue with sadness, they’re associating it with positive emotions.
Now talking about color metaphors in other languages, as we know metaphors are notoriously difficult to translate, but maybe I can mention one from my native language, Lithuanian, where we are talking about the degrees of anger through different colors. So if you are a little bit angry, you are white. And then you get more angry, then you are red. I think that’s like the standard anger. And then you get furious, you get black. And if you are extremely, extremely furious, then you are purple. So languages can also code, not only the emotions with colors, but also the intensity of emotion with colors.
Mills: Can colors make us feel emotions? I’m wondering if you’re in a red room, are you more likely to become angry or feel amorous or do you feel calmer if you’re looking at blue or green in a landscape?
Jonauskaite: This is a very good question. I’ve been working on the links between colors and emotions for 10 years. And every time we are researching them, we are just associating the color with the word of emotion. So kind of research doesn’t mean that colors make you feel anything. To answer this question, we have to put people in spaces that are colored through let’s say VR or light or paint, and then we need to measure their felt emotions. So there are very few controlled studies in this domain and the ones that are there, they are showing very contradictory results.
So in fact, it seems that colors are not affecting our emotions that much, especially they’re not affecting them so specifically that if you are in a red room, you would feel anger. Yes, maybe you feel a little bit more excited. That’s what one of the findings that we have. Red increases arousal, but somewhat. But the effects of colors on emotions are not so specific. So when we talk about all these links like yellow and joy, or envy and green, we are really in the domain of our minds. We are not really in the domain of felt emotions.
Mills: So in prepping for this, I ran into some stories about the idea of “drunk tank pink,” and I’m hoping that you have encountered that in your work as well. This came from some research years ago that led to some prisons painting cells a particular shade of pink, thinking that it was going to calm down the inmates, but then later they discovered this was flawed. Can you talk about that research and what’s wrong with it?
Jonauskaite: Yeah. So you’re talking about the Baker-Miller pink?
Mills: Exactly.
Jonauskaite: The Baker-Miller pink. So the original studies were conducted in the ‘70s and they showed that prisoners supposedly got calmer when they were in the pink space, but in fact, they didn’t really run the studies the way we are running studies nowadays. In other words, the prisoners spent one year in the white cells and then the second year in the pink cells. So obviously when you spent longer in the cells, you are less aggressive.
And in 2015, Genschow and colleagues reran the study in using modern methods in psychological science, and they found absolutely no difference between the white and the pink rooms for prisoner aggressiveness. So we can say that no, Baker-Miller pink is not reducing aggressiveness in prisoners, and yet today one in five prisons in Europe have at least one pink prison cell. So what does it mean? We are implementing the findings that we are not sure about much faster than the science can run behind, and therefore it’s so important to run systematic studies and really understand the phenomenon before we are bringing them into for our consumers by policymakers.
Mills: So speaking of controversial studies, you’ve done some work in the area of chromotherapy, which purports to show that certain colors might have healing properties. Is there any scientific evidence to support that notion?
Jonauskaite: A short answer is no, not yet. So I will tell you quickly about the study we conducted. Basically what we did in the study is half of the participants saw colors and the other half of participants saw a white sheet of paper and we measured their stress and anxiety before and after the intervention. There were also other aspects like music and guided breathing in this intervention. And we found that their stress, anxiety were reduced after the intervention and before the intervention. So it seems as if the intervention worked.
The problem was that this reduction was exactly the same for the group which looked at colors and for the group that looked at the white sheet of paper. So it means that it’s not really due to color, but probably other aspects. I mean, we know that mindfulness works, meditation works, so we just prove kind of the same thing.
But when it comes to color, no, we cannot say that in this study at least, color therapy works. There are very few studies conducted in the area. And lastly, when we talked with participants after the experiment and we asked how they felt, some of the participants who were in the white condition, they said, “Oh, I wish I could have seen colors. It would have made my experience different.” And those who were in the color condition said, “Oh, I closed my eyes and I was just listening to the music and breathing.”
So people do what they do and there is no biological mechanism how colors, we’re not talking about light here, we are really talking about a sheet of paper with color, how colors could change physiologically our bodies. So no, for now there is not much evidence, but maybe in the future.
Mills: You just mentioned light and I wanted to ask now, light is generally white in the sense that it contains the full spectrum of colors and there’s evidence that exposure to light can have an impact on our mental health. Is that related in any way to exposure to color?
Jonauskaite: Yes and no. So you are talking now about the daylight and daylight contains all the wavelengths together. Of course, we also have colored light. When we think about lasers, we can have any color we want. And what research shows, and it’s quite strong, that exposure to intense light can improve mood, even treat seasonal affective disorders—so depression, seasonal depression—and that also goes to exposure to specific frequencies of light so-called in blue range.
So we could say that exposure to blue light is exciting, but that doesn’t mean that exposure to a blue color is exciting, it’s a completely different thing. We’re talking at very high intensities of light, which we can only achieve with a light source. And when we see a color, we usually see it reflected from an object, maybe a wall or a piece of clothing. And you can never reflect light at the same intensity as the light source is producing. Actually, this feeds back to our discussion about color therapy, often when there are claims made about color therapy, they talk about the light, but in fact they work with colors and these two aspects shouldn’t be confused.
Mills: Let’s talk for a minute about color blindness, which is fairly common, especially among men. About 8% of men have some type of color blindness. Do people who are color-blind make the same connections between color and emotion as everybody else?
Jonauskaite: Yes. So I also conducted research on color blindness and in our studies we found that these men who have color vision deficiency, they did associate colors and emotions in the same way, which is very striking because they obviously do not see colors in the same way as non-color-blind participants. So what we think is happening is that they can name colors very well.
Color blindness doesn’t mean that you don’t see colors at all. Here we’re talking about the red-green dichromacy. It doesn’t mean that they cannot see colors at all. They only see a reduced spectrum. But through learning, growing up in a society where we have colored pencils and colored t-shirts, they get trained how to name even very similar shades of color. They know that this shade of green is red and that shade of green is green. So when you confront them with a color, they can name it at 95% accuracy and then they produce emotional associations which are similar to non-color-blind men.
So this kind of finding really speaks towards the idea that color-emotion associations are very conceptual. They really function at the level of our mind and they don’t have much to do with the actual perception of the color, at least nowadays. Perhaps at the beginning when they were formed, the perception mattered more. But nowadays it’s really about just linking the two. Actually we have some studies when we give participants a color word and they have to produce the first thing that comes to their mind, and then you give the word red very often you get back anger. So that’s it. The link is direct. Whereas with yellow, we get sometimes joy, but we also get sunshine, sunlight, or with blue we get words like sky and ocean.
So here we have some objects that have probably emotional connotations. If we think sunshine, if we live in the rainy countries, then probably being in yellow sunshine makes us feel happy. So it makes sense that yellow is associated with joy. But with red, of course there is association with blood, but a link between red and anger is so immediate, so well established. And if there is one association that you can almost always find, it’ll be red and anger.
Mills: Have you looked at all into the Stroop phenomenon, that test where maybe you have a sign or a t-shirt that says, it says “red,” but the color is green. It says “yellow,” but it’s actually orange and people’s brains are not fully connecting because they don’t know exactly what it is that there’s perceiving. Have you looked into that at all and what’s going on in the brain when you take a Stroop test?
Jonauskaite: Yeah, so the Stroop effect is very interesting. Usually there is a color word, let’s say red, and it’s written in a different ink, let’s say blue. And what people find easier is read the color words. They ignore the color of the ink and they can just read yellow, red, green, blah, blah, blah. But what they find more difficult is to name the ink of the color. Because we are so trained in reading things that there is an interference between the reading and the naming of the thing we are seeing. How this links with emotions? I don’t know. We’ve never used this test in our studies. But my prediction would be that when we ask them to link the words, probably they would have no problem associating them with emotions. But when we ask them to link the colors of the ink, there will be this interference effect. But again, I don’t know, we haven’t run the study.
Mills: Well, let’s talk for a minute about favorite colors. There are a lot of quizzes that you can take online that would have us believe that people’s favorite color can tell us something about a person’s personality. Is there any research that backs that up?
Jonauskaite: Again, this is a very uncharted territory, and when we started researching color preferences, favorite colors, we were stunned because over and over again, wherever you look, we find that blue is the color that everyone likes. Or in other words, at least it’s the color that no one hates. And this finding has been reported 100 years ago, and every study nowadays is still no matter where in the world you are, blue is the favorite color.
On the other hand, colors like yellow and pink are really disliked. Now what does it tell about our personality? We wondered the same. And we went online and we looked at different statements that are made. For example, it said that if you like red, you are an extrovert and if you like blue, you are a calm person. And it already made me think that okay, they are talking about the same kind of associations that we just talked before, like blue and calmness, but now they are being translated into the personality domain.
We’re interested into personality domains. So we set ourselves to test this. We extracted the most frequent predictions and we collected data from 400 participants. They set their favorite color, they also completed the personality questionnaire, and we tried to correlate the two. So well, to cut a long story short, we didn’t find any links between one’s favorite color and one’s personality, suggesting that it doesn’t really matter what you like.
At the same time you find that 50% of people are choosing blue anyway. So there is not so much variability in the favorite colors. Another thing that we find is that these predictions, let’s say about a red and extroversion, they also apply to other colors. If you like orange, you’re extroverted, if you like yellow, you’re extroverted, if you like pink, you’re extroverted and so on and so forth. So how can these associations be specific anyway? So from the scientific point of view, in fact, all of these claims do not make much sense.
In contrast, what makes more sense is the colors that we choose to wear to signal certain things to people. So a study conducted by my colleague Chris at the Rochester Institute of Technology showed that if you are looking at someone wearing red, you think they are more extroverted. So it doesn’t matter whether they are actually extroverted or not, but the choice of color is signaling certain properties and they have meanings in our society.
Mills: Are there gender differences in the way that people experience color? And I’m asking because there’s a stereotype that women notice and name multitudes of subtle shades like they’ll talk about lilac and lavender and periwinkle. All men will just say purple or blue. Is there any science that backs that up or is that just a stereotype that’s based on gender expectations?
Jonauskaite: I know exactly which meme you are talking about, and what I can say is that there is a high variability in the number of color terms people know. So some know only 11 basic terms and others maybe know 100, especially when we go to specialists who have to use colors in their everyday life. So there is this very high variability, but there is no difference between men and women. So some men can know a lot of colors and other women can know few color terms. So yeah.
Mills: How did we end up associating pink with girls and blue with boys? Where did that meme come from?
Jonauskaite: Yes, this is actually not a very old association. So this is about 100 years ago. In 1920s, it just popped up that suddenly society started coding, kind of gender coding the kids. Before, they were wearing white. And there is this idea that there was a reversal in the association that in the past, boys were associated with pink and girls with blue. So this is actually not so true. Perhaps people didn’t really care so much about coding their infants with this color.
And I cannot tell you where this association came from, but I can tell you that it’s very prevalent. And nowadays, not only in the western societies, but also in other places, wherever you go, you find this kind of gender coding. And this is also reflected in color preferences. Very small girls at the age of two, when their gender identity starts forming, they start liking pink and boys start liking blue. And very interestingly, over the years, already at the age of five, boys completely avoid pink. So it’s really about the pink. It’s not about the blue. I just told you that blue is one of the favorite colors of everyone. So it’s really about the pink that boys are avoiding pink and girls like both blue and pink. And with time, this kind of gets established also in our language.
We recently did a study on Wikipedia articles where we looked at word embeddings and we found that really the word pink occurs so much more often with feminine words than any other color term. Whereas neither blue nor red, nor any other color term was not specifically associated with masculinity. So it’s kind of really, you need these two colors together to know which one is for boys and which one is for girls.
Mills: That raises the question of whether colors go in and out of style. You could look at a house and pinpoint the decade that it was decorated just from the color scheme. Are these just random fads or can you learn something from colors that are popular at a particular time?
Jonauskaite: I guess this is a question for an interior or exterior designer. Because I’ve been talking about this universal associations between colors and emotions, kind of universally found color preferences. And I don’t think that they change that much over time. It’s really more the availability. And every generation wants to differentiate themselves from a previous generation, and colors is one of the ways of doing it. And we see colors coming back over and over again. If you think about this pink in early 2000, it was really the fuchsia, the very bright pink that was popular. And recently it was a very soft shade of pink, baby pink. And then yes, there is another term for this very, very soft pink that was popular.
Now with the Barbie movie, perhaps another shade of pink will come up. So we kind of circling, we take the same hue. So here we’re talking about what people normally refer to color, but there are also other dimensions that are important, namely lightness and saturation. Hues can be dark or light. They can be very bright, very saturated, or they can be very grayish and dull. And this is what designers can do. They can take these dimensions and they can play with them, and they can give you an impression that you’re seeing new colors from time to time when in fact they’re just manipulating a few dimensions.
Mills: And I know you’ve done work regarding color in art, and I’m wondering what have you found regarding the presence of color in art? What is the meaning? How do artists choose color? Why do they choose what they choose?
Jonauskaite: Yeah, so this is another line of research that I’m currently pursuing, and unfortunately I don’t have the data yet. But what I know from others research is that, for example, if you ask people to produce artworks and you ask them to draw anything, but that would represent a specific emotion, let’s say anger or disgust. Non-artist participants are using much more common color-emotion associations, whereas artists are using much more uncommon colors. So really artist mind have many more diverse associations, and they might combine colors in a very unusual way to perhaps evoke a certain feeling in the viewers to use non-traditional colors.
So it is very tricky to research color use in art because you don’t know if they’re using the color as the society would think or if they’re using on purpose the opposite color, but they still know about the existing associations. But yes, this is an ongoing research and I hope that in the future I will have more answers.
Mills: What are the big questions that you still want to answer, and what are you working on right now?
Jonauskaite: So currently, as I told you, I’m working on this research studies with blind people, and I really want to understand to what extent the psychological meaning of color, the link with emotions, the preferences are determined by our society and to what extent we need to see colors in order to have any of these associations. And I think this preliminary data that they have on a blind people is really exciting because it shows that color is very, very important to them. For example, they say that when they get dressed, they think that they want to choose colors that are matching. They don’t want to appear as a clown, as one of the participants said.
So it’s really much more high effort task than it is for a sighted person. They have all different ways of matching their colors, and then they know that certain colors symbolize certain things. They say, I like blue, so I want to wear blue, and I have to find this blue for myself. So really this research for the blind people is opening a new avenue into the world of language and into the world of our culture.
Mills: So to wrap up, let me ask you one unscientific question, which is what’s your favorite color and why?
Jonauskaite: So actually, my favorite color is red, not blue. And I don’t have a reason. I think that’s how it is with color preferences. Often people just like colors or dislike them, and that’s how it is.
Mills: Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Jonauskaite. It’s been really interesting.
Jonauskaite: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
