A study of colour emotion and colour preference. Part I: Colour emotions for single colours

This article classifies colour emotions for single colours and develops colour‐science‐based colour emotion models. In a psychophysical experiment, 31 observers, including 14 British and 17 Chinese subjects assessed 20 colours on 10 colour‐emotion scales: warm–cool, heavy–light, modern–classical, clean–dirty, active–passive, hard–soft, tense–relaxed, fresh–stale, masculine–feminine, and like–dislike. Experimental results show no significant difference between male and female data, whereas different results were found between British and Chinese observers for the tense–relaxed and like–dislike scales. The factor analysis identified three colour‐emotion factors: colour activity, colour weight, and colour heat. The three factors agreed well with those found by Kobayashi and Sato et al. Four colour‐emotion models were developed, including warm–cool, heavy–light, active–passive, and hard–soft. These models were compared with those developed by Sato et al. and Xin and Cheng. The results show that for each colour emotion the models of the three studies agreed with each other, suggesting that the four colour emotions are culture‐independent across countries. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 232–240, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20010     

A study of colour emotion and colour preference. Part III: Colour preference modeling

In this study three colour preference models for single colours were developed. The first model was developed on the basis of the colour emotions, clean–dirty, tense–relaxed, and heavy–light. In this model colour preference was found affected most by the emotional feeling “clean.” The second model was developed on the basis of the three colour‐emotion factors identified in Part I, colour activity, colour weight, and colour heat. By combining this model with the colour‐science‐based formulae of these three factors, which have been developed in Part I, one can predict colour preference of a test colour from its colour‐appearance attributes. The third colour preference model was directly developed from colour‐appearance attributes. In this model colour preference is determined by the colour difference between a test colour and the reference colour (L*, a*, b*) = (50, ?8, 30). The above approaches to modeling single‐colour preference were also adopted in modeling colour preference for colour combinations. The results show that it was difficult to predict colour‐combination preference by colour emotions only. This study also clarifies the relationship between colour preference and colour harmony. The results show that although colour preference is strongly correlated with colour harmony, there are still colours of which the two scales disagree with each other. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 381–389, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20047     

Cross‐regional comparison of colour emotions Part II: Qualitative analysis

During the colour perception process, an associated feeling or emotion is induced in our brains, and this kind of emotion is known as colour emotion. In Part I of this study, a quantitative analysis of the cross‐regional differences and similarities of colour emotions as well as the influence of hue, lightness, and chroma on the colour emotions of the subjects from Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand, was carried out. In Part II, colour emotions of the subjects in any two regions were compared directly using colour planners showing the effect of the lightness and the chroma of colours. The colour planners can help the designers to understand the taste and feelings of the target customers and facilitate them to select suitable colours for the products that are intended to be supplied in different regions. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 458–466, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20063     

Age effects on colour emotion,preference, and harmony

Two psychophysical experiments were carried out to investigate whether or not colour emotion responses would change with the advance of the viewer's age. Two forms of stimuli were used: 30 single colours (for Experiment 1) and 190 colour pairs (for Experiment 2). Four word pairs, warm/cool, heavy/light, active/passive, and like/dislike, were used to assess colour emotion and preference in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, harmonious/disharmonious was also used in addition to the four scales for Experiment 1. A total of 72 Taiwanese observers participated, including 40 (20 young and 20 older) for Experiment 1 and 32 (16 young and 16 older) for Experiment 2. The experimental results show that for single colours, all colour samples were rated as less active, less liked, and cooler for older observers than for young observers. For colour combinations, light colour pairs were rated as less active and cooler for older observers than for young observers; achromatic colour pairs and those consisting of colours in similar chroma were rated as cooler, less liked and less harmonious for older observers than for young observers. The findings may challenge a number of existing theories, including the adaptation mechanism for retaining consistent perception of colour appearance across the lifespan, the modeling of colour emotion based on relative colour appearance values, and the additive approach to prediction of colour‐combination emotion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2011     

A colour harmony model for two‐colour combinations

This study investigates harmony in two‐colour combinations in order to develop a quantitative model. A total of 1431 colour pairs were used as stimuli in a psychophysical experiment for the visual assessment of harmony. These colour pairs were generated using 54 colours selected systematically from CIELAB colour space. During the experiment, observers were presented with colour pairs displayed individually against a medium gray background on a cathode ray tube monitor in a darkened room. Colour harmony was assessed for each colour pair using a 10‐category scale ranging from “extremely harmonious” to “extremely disharmonious.” The experimental results showed a general pattern of two‐colour harmony, from which a quantitative model was developed and principles for creating harmony were derived. This model was tested using an independent psychophysical data set and the results showed satisfactory performance for model prediction. The study also discusses critical issues including the definition of colour harmony, the relationship between harmony and pleasantness, and the relationship between harmony and order in colour. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 31, 191–204, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20208     

Universal models of colour emotion and colour harmony

A new set of quantitative models of colour emotion and colour harmony were developed in this study using psychophysical data collected from 12 regions in the world, including Argentina, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the UK. These data have previously been published in journals or conferences (for details see Tables 1 and 2 ). For colour emotion, three new models were derived, showing satisfactory predictive performance in terms of an average correlation coefficient of 0.78 for “warm/cool”, 0.80 for “heavy/light” and 0.81 for “active/passive”. The new colour harmony model also had satisfactory predictive performance, with an average correlation coefficient of 0.72. Principal component analysis shows that the common colour harmony principles, including hue similarity, chroma similarity, lightness difference and high lightness principles, were partly agreed by observers of the same region. The findings suggest that it is feasible to develop universal models of colour emotion and colour harmony, and that the former was found to be relatively more culture‐independent than the latter.     

Request for existing experimental datasets on colour emotion and colour harmony

The Technical Committee 1‐86 of the International Commission on Illumination on “Models of colour emotion and harmony” is requesting the submission of datasets for use in developing new models of colour emotion and colour harmony. The data should be submitted to the TC Chair, Dr. Li‐Chen Ou at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2012     

Cross‐regional comparison of colour emotions Part I: Quantitative analysis

Colour emotion is a feeling or emotion induced in our brains when we look at a colour. In this article, the colour emotional responses obtained by conducting visual experiments in different regions, namely Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand, using a set of 218 colour samples are compared using a quantitative approach in an attempt to study the influence of different cultural and geographical locations. Twelve pairs of colour emotions described in opponent words were used. These word pairs are warm–cool, light–dark, deep–pale, heavy–light, vivid–sombre, gaudy–plain, striking–subdued, dynamic–passive, distinct–vague, transparent–turbid, soft–hard, and strong–weak. These word pairs represent the fundamental emotional response of human beings toward colour. The influences of lightness and chroma were found to be much more important than that of the hue on the colour emotions studied. Good correlations of colour emotions among these three regions in East Asia were found, with the best ones for colour emotion pairs being light–dark and heavy–light. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 451–457, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20062     

A cross‐cultural comparison of colour emotion for two‐colour combinations

Psychophysical experiments were conducted in the UK, Taiwan, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, and Iran to assess colour emotion for two‐colour combinations using semantic scales warm/cool, heavy/light, active/passive, and like/dislike. A total of 223 observers participated, each presented with 190 colour pairs as the stimuli, shown individually on a cathode ray tube display. The results show consistent responses across cultures only for warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive. The like/dislike scale, however, showed some differences between the observer groups, in particular between the Argentinian responses and those obtained from the other observers. Factor analysis reveals that the Argentinian observers preferred passive colour pairs to active ones more than the other observers. In addition to the cultural difference in like/dislike, the experimental results show some effects of gender, professional background (design vs. nondesign), and age. Female observers were found to prefer colour pairs with high‐lightness or low‐chroma values more than their male counterparts. Observers with a design background liked low‐chroma colour pairs or those containing colours of similar hue more than nondesign observers. Older observers liked colour pairs with high‐lightness or high‐chroma values more than young observers did. Based on the findings, a two‐level theory of colour emotion is proposed, in which warm/cool, heavy/light, and active/passive are identified as the reactive‐level responses and like/dislike the reflective‐level response. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2012     

Individual differences in human colour vision as derived from stiles & Burch 10° colour matching functions

Individual differences between the 49 Stiles & Burch observers have been analyzed using the object‐colour space put forth recently (J of Vision 2009;9:1–23). A set of rectangular reflectance spectra has been used as a common frame of reference for representing object colours for all the observers. Being metameric to one of these rectangular reflectance spectra, every reflectance spectrum can be geometrically represented as a point in the three‐dimentional space. The interindividual differences reveal themselves in that, for various observers, the same reflectance spectrum maps to different points in this space. It has been found that on average such differences do not exceed the differences in object‐colour appearance induced by an illumination shift from daylight to the fluorescent daylight simulator F1. Such small individual variations have been accounted for by the fact that the cone spectral tuning curves have a special form that mitigates the individual differences in cone spectral positioning. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2013     

Colour meaning and context

This study compares semantic ratings of colour samples (chips) with those of the same colours applied to a variety of objects. In total, 25 participants took part in the colour‐meaning experiment, and assessed 54 images using five semantic scales. In Experiment 1, simplified images (coloured silhouettes) were used whereas in Experiment 2 real images were used. In this article, the terms “chip meaning” and “context meaning” are used for convenience. Chip meaning refers to the associated meanings when only isolated colour chips were evaluated while context meaning refers to colour meanings evaluated when colours were applied to a variety of product categories. Analyses were performed on the data for the two experiments individually. The results of Experiment 1 show relatively few significant differences (28%) between chip meaning and context meaning. However, differences were found for a number of colours, objects, and semantic scales i.e., red and black; hand wash and medicine; and masculine‐feminine and elegant‐vulgar. The results of Experiment 2 show more significant differences (43%) between chip meaning and context meaning. In summary, the context sometimes affects the colour meaning; however, the degree to which colour meanings are invariant to context is perhaps slightly surprising. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 42, 450–459, 2017     

Evaluation of the crispening effect using CRT‐displayed colour samples

In this study, the crispening effect was clearly observed when 38 neutral‐coloured sample pairs with only lightness differences were assessed under 5 neutral backgrounds of different lightness values. The sample pairs are CRT‐based colours, and they are selected along the CIELAB L* axis from 0 to 100. The magnitude of colour difference of each pair is 5.0 CIELAB units. The visual assessment results showed that there is a very large crispening effect. The colour differences of the same pair assessed under different backgrounds could differ by a factor of up to 8 for a sample pair with low lightness. The perceived colour difference was enlarged when the lightness of a sample pair was similar to that of the background. The extent of crispening effect and its quantification are discussed in this investigation. The performances of five colour‐difference equations were also tested, including the newly developed CIEDE2000. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 374–380, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20045     

Testing LED lighting for colour discrimination and colour rendering

Light‐emitting diode (LED) technology offers the possibility of obtaining white light, despite narrow‐band spectra. In order to characterize the colour discrimination efficiency of various LED clusters, we designed a classification test, composed of 32 caps equally distributed along the hue circle at about 3 ΔE* _ab‐unit intervals. Forty normal colour observers were screened under four different LED test light sources adjusted for best colour rendering, and under one control incandescent light of the same colour temperature. We used commercially available red, green, blue, and/or amber LED clusters. These yielded a poor colour rendering index (CRI). They also induced a significantly higher number of erroneous arrangements than did the control light. Errors are located around greenish‐blue and purplish‐red shades, parallel to the yellow‐axis direction, whereas when the distribution of light covers the full spectrum, the LED clusters achieve satisfactory colour discrimination efficiency. With respect to the lights we tested, the colour discrimination is correlated with the CIE CRIs as well as with a CRI based on our sample colours. We stress the fact that increasing the chroma of samples by lighting does not necessarily imply an improvement of colour discrimination. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 34, 8–17, 2009.     

Adaptation and colour matching of display and surface colours

In an asymmetric colour matching experiment, eleven observers adjusted computer displays to colour‐match surface samples in a viewing booth. We found systematic discrepancies between the observers' judgments and the predictions of the CIE 1964 Standard Colorimetric Observer. The features of the discrepancies are consistent with previous reports on adaptation in colour matching and on failures of colorimetric additivity, but have never been confirmed to be significant in practical colorimetry. We attribute the discrepancies to post‐receptoral adaptation mainly of the blue‐yellow chromatic channel, and report a framework of an adaptation transform based on the MacLeod‐Boynton chromaticity diagram which can compensate for them without abandoning traditional colorimetry and the use of tristimulus values. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 34, 182–193, 2009     

A comprehensive model of colour appearance for related and unrelated colours of varying size viewed under mesopic to photopic conditions

CIE has recommended two previous appearance models, CIECAM97s and CIECAM02. However, these models are unable to predict the appearance of a comprehensive range of colours. The purpose of this study is to describe a new, comprehensive colour appearance model, which can be used to predict the appearance of colours under various viewing conditions that include a range of stimulus sizes, levels of illumination that range from scotopic through to photopic, and related and unrelated stimuli. In addition, the model has a uniform colour space that provides a colour‐difference formula in terms of colour appearance parameters. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 42, 293–304, 2017     

Seasonal and emotional associations of the colours and their effects on directing the Turkish fashion

This article suggests a potential scientific approach in finding colour effects on human emotions and seasonal associations. A visual assessment of the colour samples was carried out with the help of Turkish observers in Denizli, Turkey. From the study, it was found that Turkish four season colours of spring, summer, autumn and winter were bright green, vivid yellow, dull yellow and dark grayish brown respectively. Moreover, the colour data were arranged in terms of gender and age of the observers. In this analysis, it was observed that the colour preferences changed according to the gender and age of the observers. For instance, the top spring colour preference of young ladies were vivid bluish green, light blue and bright purple, on the other hand the top spring colour preference of adult ladies was light yellow green and the top spring colour preference of young and adult men was bright green. In the study, the observers were also asked about elicited emotional associations of the main colours on their mind and the data were collected in a table. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 41, 523–529, 2016     

Effect of observer metamerism on colour matching of display and surface colours

We studied the individual variability of asymmetric metameric colour matching between computer displays and object colour stimuli in conditions typical for the surface colour industries. Using two different computational techniques, we assessed the contribution of observer metamerism to this variability. In the studied conditions of spatially separated computer display and surface colour stimuli, this contribution was found to be insignificant for all colours but neutrals. In the chromaticness plane, the range of matches made by different observers practically coincides with the range of matches made by an individual observer. Consequently, we conclude that in the task of matching spatially separated display and surface colours, the range of matches made by a group of observers cannot be determined from variations in their colour‐matching functions, and thus the paradigm of the Standard Deviate Observer is shown to be inapplicable to the studied conditions. We suggest that individual variability in these conditions is governed by mechanisms of chromatic discrimination, and can be modeled by advanced colour difference formulae with suitably adjusted parametric coefficients. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 33, 346–359, 2008     

An example of facade colour design of mass housing

The colours and architectural characteristics of building facades are the major factors affecting the general appearance of cities. When cities are examined from various perspectives, first impressions are obtained from the geometrical forms and facade colours of buildings. The facade colour arrangements should reflect the features of the region and buildings. In this context various features of natural and artificial environments such as plant life, water elements, climate, and historical texture should be examined, and a facade colour arrangement should be designed according to the examination results. In addition, the other factors effective in determining the colour and style of a building, such as social‐cultural background of the society and traditional and natural building materials, should not be forgotten because in some regions traditional buildings with special construction styles, materials, and colours create a specific identity for the settlements and cities. The aims of this article are to elucidate the colour contrast, colour arrangement, and colour design stages of mass housing and to explain the colour design of Bizimkent Mass Housing, which was constructed in a new dwelling zone in Istanbul, Turkey, as an example of such an arrangement. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 27, 291–299, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.10068