Do you feel sadness when staring at the blue sea? Or do you feel joy when holding a bouquet of yellow flowers? The science behind this rush of emotions one feels when surrounded by a certain color is classified as color psychology. Colors can impact human behavior such as communication, change of emotions, and the human mindset overall. They are even known to affect the buying choices of customers. So, how exactly do hues, tints, and tones of colors influence our minds?
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Origin of Color Psychology
Egyptians are often credited as the first group to study colors’ influence on human behavior, as well as its benefits and consequences. They sorted colors into categories of various emotions that they each evoked. Some of these include the color blue for soothing pain and the color black which stood for life and rebirth.
When talking about the history of color psychology, the mentioning of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe cannot be missed. Goethe was a German artist who published the Theory of Colors in 1810. He incorporated many ideas formed by Sir Isaac Newton in his collection of theories such as the role darkness and lightness plays in the color spectrum. Furthermore, Goethe often studied and wrote about the psychological impacts of colors from an artist’s point of view, which shed a new light from a different point of view onto this topic.
How Colors Affect Our Behavior
The way different colors affect emotions and everyday behavior depend largely on how one perceives them. The psychology of color perception concerns both the human eye and the way an object absorbs and reflects wavelengths. Although humans can see only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, it is still enough to see thousands and thousands of colors.
There are multiple factors that affect color perception such as age, gender, and culture. People from different cultures associate one color to various meanings and symbols. For example, the color yellow symbolizes wealth and money in many African countries due to its resemblance to gold. Conversely, yellow symbolizes jealousy and weakness in France due to their history of painting the doors of criminals yellow.
Color perception plays a vital role in how humans are impacted by colors in any setting. Despite its relevance in understanding and studying humans’ reactions, there are still a few issues that can arise when dealing with color perception due to it being subjective. Color perception is considered to be subjective since there is an endless amount of reactions that humans can have when perceiving a color. For instance, one might wear red to set a romantic mood, while another person may view it as anger and frustration. This makes it complex to determine if it is actually the color that is evoking these behaviors.
Universal Meanings of Colors
Even though the way colors are viewed are partly subjective, there are still some universal meanings for them.
Warm colors, such as red, orange, and yellow, are known to evoke a range of emotions from feelings of warmth to feelings of hostility.
Cool colors, such as green, blue, and purple, are known to stimulate calmness and feelings of sorrow.
Hope you enjoyed reading about color psychology!
Written by: Yujin Park
Sources:
Cherry, K. (2020, May 28). Color Psychology: Does It Affect How You Feel? VeryWellMind. https://www.verywellmind.com/color-psychology-2795824
Bailey, R. (2019, May 6). How Colors Affect Human Behavior. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/color-psychology-and-human-behavior-4151666
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Popova, M. (2012, August 17). 19th-Century Insight Into the Psychology of Color and Emotion. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/19th-century-insight-into-the-psychology-of-color-and-emotion/261261/
Datacolor. (2020, September 29). The Science of How We See Color—And Why We Need Spectrophotometers. Datacolor. https://www.datacolor.com/why-we-cant-agree-color-perception/#:~:text=Perceived%20color%20depends%20on%20how,to%20see%20millions%20of%20colors.
SmartTravel, Contributor. (2017, January 26). What Colors Mean in Other Cultures. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-colors-mean-in-other_b_9078674
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