Seeing the World Through “Pink‐Colored Glasses”: The Link Between Optimism and Pink

Abstract

This study investigated optimism, which is considered a personality trait, from the grounded cognition perspective. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the association between pink and optimism. In Experiment 1A, 22 undergraduates (10 females; M = 23.68) were asked to classify words as optimistic or pessimistic as fast as possible. Half the words were presented in pink and half in black. Experiment 1B (N = 24; 14 females; M = 22.82) was identical to 1A except for the color of the words-black and light blue instead of pink-to rule out the possible influence of brightness. Experiment 2 exposed 144 participants (74 females; M = 25.18) to pink or yellow and then measured their optimism level. The findings for Experiments 1A and 1B indicated an association between pink and optimism regardless of brightness. Experiment 2 found that mere exposure to pink increased optimism levels for females. These results contribute to the dynamic view of personality, current views on optimism, and the growing literature on grounded cognition.

Pink for Girls, Red for Boys, and Blue for Both Genders: Colour Preferences in Children and Adults

“…Blue is associated with mainly positive objects or concepts (Palmer & Schloss, 2010) as well as positive emotions (Adams & Osgood, 1973;Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). Of interest, however, is pink because, contrary to theory-driven expectations (Palmer & Schloss, 2010), low liking of pink (in one sample) did not mean that pink associated with negative emotions (in another sample), but actually with positive emotions (see also Gil & Le Bigot, 2014;Kalay-Shahin, Cohen, Lemberg, Harary, & Lobel, 2016;Simmons, 2011). We conjecture that gender differences in colour preferences are not primarily explainable by differences in colour-emotion associations.…”