No abstract

No abstract

Eleven colour-emotion scales, warm-cool, heavylight, modern-classical, clean-dirty, active-passive, hardsoft, harmonious-disharmonious, tense-relaxed, fresh-stale, masculine-feminine, and like-dislike,

No abstract

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

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 lowchroma values more than their male counterparts. Observers with a design background liked low-chroma This article was published online on 12 November 2010. An error was subsequently identified in Table II. This notice is included in the online and print version to indicate that both have been corrected. *Correspondence to: Li-Chen Ou (e-mail: l.ou@leeds.ac.uk).Volume 37, Number 1, February 2012 23 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.

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, 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. K E Y W O R D Scolour emotion, colour harmony, cross-cultural study, universal model

This study investigates how a holistic color interval, i.e., the nondirectional color difference between a pair of colors in a CIELAB uniform color space, influences perceived color harmony. A set of 1035 test color pairs displayed on a CRT was evaluated for the degree of harmony. These test color pairs consist of pairs combined from among the selected 46 test colors evenly distributed in color space. The subjects were asked to select their three preferred colors from these 46 test colors and then to evaluate the degree of harmony of the test color combinations. The color intervals (⌬E* ab ) of each test color combination were calculated and treated as values of an independent variable. In addition, the evaluated degrees of color harmony were considered as values of a dependent variable, in which statistical analysis confirmed the relationship: the degree of harmony is a cubic function of the color interval. Moreover, the plot of this relationship allowed us to identify four color intervals: roughly corresponding to the regions of first ambiguity, similarity, second ambiguity, and contrast in Moon and Spencer's model. However, our results indicated that Moon and Spencer's principles for classifying harmonious/disharmonious regions in terms of the color interval for three color attributes-lightness, chroma and hue-may be inappropriate in predicting perceived color harmony. As for the color intervals between a pair of colors considered as a function of the three attributes, the interval for lightness may have a predominant effect on color harmony, expressed in terms of a cubic relationship. Results of the study further demonstrated that the subject's choice of colors significantly influences perceived color harmony.