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Recent color research has investigated relationships between the emotions and preference. The analyses also explore cross-cultural and gender differences in response to color. In a pair of studies, Ou and associates investigated color emotion and color appearance attributes—first for individual colors and then for pairs of colors.
When single colors were assessed, no differences were found in the emotional assessments of colors by men and women, although differences were found between British and Chinese participants on some assessments. The two colors showing the greatest differences between Chinese and British participants were black and deep purple. Chinese were more apt to see black as tense, and the British were more apt to see it as relaxed. Chinese participants disliked deep purple, which was liked by British participants. The colors used in this experiment varied in hue, lightness, and chroma, and showed good coverage of the CIELAB color space.
When the investigators used colors in combination, they found that men and women had different emotional reactions to color combinations, but there were no differences in emotional responses between the Chinese and British participating in the study. The second set of research indicated that “female observers tended to prefer the colour pairs that were ‘soft,’ ‘relaxed,’ ‘light,’ or ‘feminine,’ whereas this tendency did not occur for male observers.”
Ou, Li-Chen., M Ronnier Luo, Andrée Woodcock, and Angela Wright. 2004. A study of colour emotion and colour preference, part I: Colour emotions for single colors. Color Research and Application, vol. 29 no. 3, pp. 232–40.
Ou, Li-Chen., M. Ronnier Luo, Andrée Woodcock, and Angela Wright. 2004. A study of colour emotion and colour preference, part II: Colour emotions for two-colour combinations.” Color Research and Application, vol. 29 no. 4, pp. 292–98.