Influence of Color on Emotion Recognition Is Not Bidirectional: An Investigation of the Association Between Color and Emotion Using a Stroop-Like Task

Abstract

The association between color and emotion has been shown, with red facilitating recognition of anger and green facilitating recognition of happiness. However, it has been unclear if emotional stimulus conversely facilitates and/or inhibits recognition of such colors. This study used a Stroop-like task, which required participants to ignore facial expressions and recognize color, in order to investigate the influence of emotion on recognition of color. In addition, this study investigated the association between color and emotion recognition from emoticons, as it was recently suggested that the process of emotion recognition from emoticons was different from that of actual faces. Results revealed that for facial expressions and emoticons, color influenced emotion recognition, in line with previous studies. Conversely, facial expression did not influence recognition of color. The results suggest that in emotion recognition people consider surrounding contextual information and integrate it automatically; however, in color recognition, they do not.

Effects of color–emotion association on facial expression judgments

“…The analysis of correct response rate found no significant effects of background colors or the emotions in the facial stimuli, perhaps due to the ceiling effect. The analysis of response time, on the other hand, showed that judgment of a happy face was faster than judgment of a sad face against a yellow background, consistent with the previous finding (Ikeda, 2020). However, contrary to our hypothesis, judgment of happy and sad faces was not affected by a blue or gray background.…”

“…In terms of social cognition, it is important for humans to understand others' emotional states. Facial expressions function as one of the most effective cues when people recognize others' emotions (Collignon et al, 2008;Ikeda, 2020;Massaro & Egan, 1996;Van den Stock et al, 2007). Humans also utilize other resources, including emotional contexts (Barratt et al, 2016).…”

“…To examine the effects of color associated with happiness and sadness on emotional judgments, we presented yellow and blue as the background of facial stimuli, colors that have been suggested to be associated with happiness and sadness, respectively (e.g., Ikeda, 2020).…”

“…We also included a gray background, which has been suggested to be strongly associated with sadness (Jonauskaite, Parraga, et al, 2020). Based on the results of previous studies (Ikeda, 2020;Jonauskaite, Parraga, et al, 2020), we expected yellow to enhance happiness judgments; in other words, the correct response rate would be highest and the response time would be fastest for judgments of happy facial expressions against a yellow background. We also examined whether blue and gray facilitate sadness judgment and which color, if any, affects the judgment more strongly.…”

Color‐hierarchies in executive control of monkeys' behavior

“…Such modulatory effects of the green stop-cues on ensuing behavior has not been reported in humans yet. The proposed models of color-hierarchy in driving avoidance-approach behavior in humans (Elliot, 2015;Mehta & Zhu, 2009) have been mainly focused on the red and blue colors, however in humans green color is associated with positive emotions and feelings (Dzulkifli & Mustafar, 2013;Ikeda, 2019) and creative behavior (Lichtenfeld et al, 2012). Further studies in humans, comparing red, green and blue in the context of the same task would be necessary to reveal the order of color-hierarchy in each task and its correspondence with that in monkeys.…”