Color and temparature

We have all heard the question, “What’s your favorite color?” at some point in time, usually on an online personality test. While there are those of us who believe this to have some sort of basis, there are others who are more skeptical. What makes us associate black with evil, white with purity, and blue with peace? Why do we like some colors better than others? (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors.html) Is any of this color nonsense relevant? A recent study suggests that it is. The study found that colors can have an effect on perception of individuals in a purchasing environment; essentially, cool colors yield more positive purchasing results (Yildirim, Akalin-Baskaya, & Hidayetoglu, 2007). It would seem perceptions of colors can impact your mood. Wexner (1954) conducted a study to determine what colors we associate with adjectives that possessed the same meaning as the mood-tone. Participants in the experiment were asked to choose the color that best fit each word group (which consisted of the mood-tone and adjectives). As most people might expect, black was associated with power, yellow with cheerfulness, and so on. What is interesting is that the intensity of the color affected which colors were associated with which words. In other words, how dark (or light) the color was determined if it was appropriate to associate it with a word, such as dignified. In a separate study, it was found that color also has an effect on the way that we react to and perceive various scenes, particularly when the structure of a scene is obscured in some way (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007). How is this related to Wexner’s experiment? This indicates that atmosphere of a room and the mood we get when in a room is altered by the color, very much in agreement with the study done by Yildirim, et al. (2007), where the structural elements in the area weren’t changed.