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Topic: colour mood (Read 15608 times) |
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paul thomas
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I apologise if this seems more like an answer than question but it is a question. Note my spelling is English (British) or just incorrect. This question is related to the ‘calming down’ dt01pqt message.
I have been doing a bit of research on how colour affects human behaviour and mood (If you believe it). All my secondary research indicates that specific colours have certain effects e.g., red promotes confidence, vitality, but also is confrontational and a danger sign; where as pink is romantic, tender, softhearted, etc. The problems I have with these studies are that they are using colour labels that are primitive/immature in their understanding of colour. What I mean by primitive is for instance non-colours like pink and brown. Pink is just a lighter red but there seems to be a tremendous difference in mood setting. When people (children) think of pink they identify a specific range of lightness in red, which portrays the above mood characteristics. There is a difference between a light blue and a dark blue in term of mood setting but the difference is less marked than red to pink (presumably). Brown is just a tertiary colour, but most people would identify it as a red positive earthy colour and creates neutrality, strength and maturity. However tertiary (brown) can be grey, blue, and green in essence. No wander a mixture is associated with neutrality.
With all that in mind here come the questions: Is there any specific knowledge that in terms of what hues, saturation of colour in psychology? How can I choose a red (for instance) that is passionate confident but non confrontational? And what about colour combinations? For instance a room that has blue floor makes the white walls seem whiter and cleaner.
My own hypostasis is that the mood characteristics are transitional between the spectrum points of colour (not necessarily linear). There are specific relationships between colour combinations and mood. Finally light affects such as radiance can alter the original mood perception of a colour.
Gratefully,
Paul
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william wu
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #1 on: Nov 3rd, 2002, 4:08am » |
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Very interesting Paul, I never really thought about such interpretations of color until now. It's true, a bathroom with a color scheme of white and light blue seems cleaner, and red and pink can have very different symbolic interpretations despite their proximity in the electromagnetic spectrum.
I did a tiny bit of online research and I found the following link in google cache which may be of interest to you. It's a paper titled LIGHT: AN ELEMENT IN THE ERGONOMICS OF LEARNING, by Laurence D. Martel at the National Academy of Integrative Learning. Although this article's emphasis is on learning and not calming down, it mentions some books and names (e.g. John Ott) which could be useful for more information. A large part of the article is about how cool-white fluorescent bulbs, which are used in almost all classrooms, apparently cause "bodily stress, anxiety, hyper-activity,attention problems and other distress leading to poor learning".
[URL]http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:wHhOfA4O13UC:www.intellearn.org/med ia/light%2520elem%2520lrng.pdf+light+ergonomics&hl=en&ie=UTF-8[/URL]
There must be a lot of research on choosing appropriate colors for various situations. There's a lot of stuff about this online, but I had a hard time finding any formal research papers on the subject ... well maybe that's how psychology is anyways, it's hardly a science. Most of the sites just mentioned what colors produce what feelings, but didn't try to explain why. Here's what one of them said about cool hues (tending toward green, blue, indigo, violet):
Cool colors have passive, calming qualities that aid concentration and can create a mood ofpeacefulness and tranquility. Cool shades include Violets and Blues. Green can be either warm or cool.When it's influenced by yellow, it becomes warm and when it's influenced by blue, it becomes cool. When choosing colors, it is alsoimportant to consider the effect of the lightness and darkness, or value of color. Lighter colors tend to be more active, and deeper colors tend to be passive.
greens: Health, Regeneration, Contentment, Harmony
blues: Honesty, Integrity, Trustworthy
violets: Regal, Mystic, Beauty, Inspiration
brown, neutrals, gray: Neutrals are great for adding stability and balance in a room. They include white, black, gray and colors that contain an significant amount of gray.
I know IBM has done a lot of research on choosing proper colors for computer screen schemes, so you might want to check them out.
Anyways, now what do I think. I agree that there isn't a linear relationship between mood level and light wavelength. This is evidenced by the distinct difference between red and pink. My hypothesis is that all these color interpretations arise from our associations between those colors and everyday things. For instance, the first thing I associate red with is blood, perhaps because I've seen too many violent movies and video games. The word "blood" imbues in me feelings of danger, power, excitement, alarm. However, pink is quite different. I don't associate pink with blood because no one bleeds pink unless you're a Klingon in Star Trek VI (there's some discrepancies because in other Star Trek episodes they bleed red blood ... anyways). So the only pink objects that come to mind are Valentine's Day gift boxes, carnations, and clothing for little girls. And that Clint Eastwood movie Pink Cadillac. Except for the latter, all these things tend to be soothing to the mind. So that's how I would explain the distinctly different interpretations of red and pink. For all colors I have caches of associations to objects, and how a color affects my mood depends on the symbolism of the objects in my associations.
I think this hypothesis makes sense because of how the mind visualizes things. I'm not sure how everyone else's mind works -- perhaps you could tell me how yours works -- but when I hear an abstract word like "green", I tend to visualize an object that's green. Maybe a blank plane of chartreuse for a split-second at first, but after that usually some kind of plant life. So it makes sense that we associate green with life and fertility.
To further research this hypothesis, we could do free-response surveys of what people immediately think of when they hear the names of various colors. What comes first -- the symbolic associations or the pictures of objects? Multiple Choice might have problems because reading a possible response could immediately evoke that response, and we would have false positives. Also, it would be interesting to see if color interpreations are truly cross-cultural. Do the Fore people of New Guinea (pre-literate tribal culture with supposedly zero exposure to Western civilization; famous from Ekman & Friesen's emotion recognition research) interpret the color pink the same way we do, even though they have no Valentine's Day and pink clothes for little girls? If so, then maybe the associations aren't culture-dependent because they were developed way back in human history, to hominid times. After all, why did the guy who came up with Valentine's Day color schemes choose pink in the first place? Perhaps we can trace all our color interpretations to various phenomena in nature. Red to blood and flesh, orange to oranges, blue to sky and water, green to fauna, brown to earth and fur and defecation, yellow to sunshine and lemons and urine.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 3rd, 2002, 4:11am by william wu » |
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william wu
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #2 on: Nov 3rd, 2002, 4:11am » |
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on Nov 3rd, 2002, 12:25am, xplorer wrote:My reasoning is that the 'warmer colors' down from yellow
toward red are actually tending into the range where body
tissue [brain/blood] could be thermally excited, especially by
strobing action.
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xplorer: I don't know about red light thermally exciting the bloodstream ... from a physics point of view, red is a low frequency light, and low frequency light has less energy than high frequency light. So on the visible light spectrum, red light is least likely to thermally excite something, where as violet is most likely. I know there's an IC microfabrication lab here at Berkeley in which all the lighting is purposely kept red or yellow, and perhaps this is to reduce chances of exciting the devices. Beyond violet we get UV light and X-rays.
[infrared] red orange yellow green blue [indigo] violet [ultraviolet] [x-rays] [gamma rays]
I agree that pastel blue seems much more appropriate than reds and yellows. That's something interesting thing about psychology to me ... sometimes you can just imagine what the correct answer would be, but it's often unclear as to why that's the answer. Like it's just ingrained in our experience. Actually the first thing I thought about when you mentioned strobing was psychedelic lighting effects at electronica/trance raves. Using a rapidly changing kaleidoscopic spray of colors, the lighters intend to achieve the total opposite of calming down. Conversely, strobing near-monochromatic at a very slow rate appeals to my senses in terms of calming down ... well obviously. However, as for why we should choose blue, I think this has to do with our association with water. Nourishment, refreshing, essential. Swimming, damping motion, making waves, slowing time. I'm reminded of the gentle ebb and flow of seashore tides. So for lighting effects, this might be cool: Fill a tank with water, and have fans or other engines lightly agitating the water. Then illuminate the tank through one side to project aquarium style undulations of light on the other side. Or heck, you could put fish in the tanks and have a full fledged aquarium.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 3rd, 2002, 4:25am by william wu » |
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harpanet
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #3 on: Mar 27th, 2003, 1:35pm » |
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While I have nothing useful to say (at the moment) on the psychology of colour, I would make a comment on
Quote:| For instance a room that has blue floor makes the white walls seem whiter and cleaner. |
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In this specific case I would speculate that it is a physical effect and not a psychological one. The diffuse (blue) reflection of the floor on the walls would counteract the yellowing that one gets as white walls age. A similar mechanism is used in detergents that make your clothes seem cleaner.
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jade
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #4 on: Apr 20th, 2003, 3:17pm » |
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I hope I'm not repeating anything that has been said already because to be honest, I haven't read everything above. (sorry.) I just wanted to say that I did a psychology course in which we learned that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that certain colours can create certain moods, except for the ones that are linked to certain cultural rituals (like black for mourning). Obviously, these vary depending on culture (eg in some countries death is white).
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KenYonRuKu
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #5 on: Feb 15th, 2004, 4:00pm » |
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on Apr 20th, 2003, 3:17pm, jade wrote:| Obviously, these vary depending on culture (eg in some countries death is white). |
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Indeed it is, Jade, here in Japan. That is why you see so many all-in-white characters in (predominantly) horror films. It also makes The Lord of the Rings an interesting experience for Japanese audiences!
In addition to the debate, blue colours are appetite-quenching (it's a natural reaction, seeing as there are hardly any naturally blue foodstuffs). This is why "all you can eat" buffets often have blue decor and use blue crockery and table ware... 
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Speaker
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #6 on: Apr 12th, 2004, 10:00pm » |
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I heard that McDonalds restaurants are decorated in red and bright yellow so that people eat fast and leave. The theory was that these exciting colors would keep people from hanging around.
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towr
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #7 on: Apr 13th, 2004, 2:33am » |
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I'd say there are plenty of other reasons not to hang around, or to not even go in in the first place 
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Three Hands
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #8 on: May 8th, 2004, 12:40pm » |
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I guess it's hard to tell how much of our reactions to colour is due to our upbringing and how much is due to human nature. I would imagine that quite a lot of our reaction to colours is based on how we first, or most commonly, encounter them, and so white could imply death - the paleness in the deceased's body - or cleanliness/purity - given that a white surface is most prone to showing stains. I'm not sure how well this theory applies itself to reality, but it could explain the strange difference in reaction for such similar colours as red and pink - we have trained ourselves to recognise the difference in terms of cultural upbringing (pink being a colour traditionally for girls, while red being the colour of heart & blood)
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towr
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #9 on: May 9th, 2004, 5:42am » |
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on May 8th, 2004, 12:40pm, Three Hands wrote:| I guess it's hard to tell how much of our reactions to colour is due to our upbringing and how much is due to human nature. |
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Actually, research suggest a lot of it is due to upbringing. Even how we divide the spectrum in certain colours is determined by upbringing, and has been shown to vary greatly with culture.
(And this is probably why most men haven't got the faintest as to what's the difference between bourgondy and red  )
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| « Last Edit: May 9th, 2004, 5:43am by towr » |
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Speaker
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #10 on: May 9th, 2004, 6:36pm » |
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There is something interesting about color that I would like to find out more about. Where do different societies divide the colors of the spectrum?
For instance in Japan, what Americans would call green is called blue in Japan. However the sky in Japan is also blue, as it is in the US. For instance, in Japan stop lights are red, yellow means go faster and blue means go. (But to me the go light looks green (maybe a little blue-green)).
Of course everybody sees all the colors, but the point in the spectrum that we stop calling something red and start calling it orange or yellow varies with culture.
I have heard that in the same way that Japanese color separation is different from the US, German is also different. But, I do not have any examples.
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| « Last Edit: May 9th, 2004, 6:37pm by Speaker » |
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Noke Lieu
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #11 on: May 9th, 2004, 9:09pm » |
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I seem to remember that the blue/white affect is culturally dependant.
Its true that in most European countries clothes detergents have a blue-ing nature to them.
In Brasil though, detergent has more red in it. They prefer a red-white.
Or so I am told.
Pietro K.C.?
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BNC
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #12 on: May 9th, 2004, 11:00pm » |
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I've been doing quite a lot of research into colors (for my workplace) in the last few weeks.
While I don't have anything to add to the psychology aspect, I'd like to point:
1. Red / blue whites stem from black body radiation. Hotter bodies radiate more in blue, while cooler bodies more red. TV sets for example, are usually "cool" -- around 5000K-6500K. PC monitors are hotter -- ~6500K-9300K. Probably your computer screen allows changing the "temperature" -- try it, and you'll see the different colors change ("reder" or "bluer" whites). You can read about it also here and here
2. The CIE (Commission internationale de l'Eclairage) is probably the best reference source of color perseption. It produced the CIE chromaticity diagram that coresponds colors to wavelengths (and wavelengths combination) based on research done on volunteers. The CIE system characterizes colors by a luminance parameter Y and two color coordinates x and y which specify the point on the chromaticity diagram. You can read about in in the excelent HyperPhysics site here (and elsewhere -- just google for CIE color or for CIE chromaticity).
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Icarus
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Re: colour mood
« Reply #13 on: May 10th, 2004, 6:31pm » |
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on May 9th, 2004, 9:09pm, Noke Lieu wrote:Its true that in most European countries clothes detergents have a blue-ing nature to them.
In Brasil though, detergent has more red in it. They prefer a red-white. |
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This doesn't seem quite right to me. The reason bluing agents are added to laundry detergent is that fabrics tend to "yellow" in response to sunlight and/or oxidation (I don't remember now which is the cause). The bluing agents add what was lost to the color blend by the yellowing. Red doesn't add the right wavelengths back in.
At best, I could see that Brazilians might add redding agents in with the bluing agent, to give a slightly more reddish look, but they still need the same bluing agent as European and US detergents have.
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ref owen
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 helloo
i need some information on colours and moods ... any "mentors" out there?
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