Colour and emotion across cultures

The largest survey

The broadest study so far was published in 2020 by a team led from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. About 4,600 people in 30 countries on six continents were shown twelve colour words in their own language and asked which of twenty emotions each called to mind. The patterns were strikingly alike across countries. Red was the only colour tied strongly to both a positive and a negative emotion. Brown drew the fewest emotions of any colour. Countries that were closer in language and geography gave answers that were closer still.

Where countries differ

The same study found exceptions. People in China linked white with sadness more than others did, which fits its use at funerals. In Greece, purple was linked with sadness more often than elsewhere. Later work from the same group found that yellow is linked with joy less often in countries with plenty of sunshine and more often in cold, rainy ones. Many differences that guidebooks describe, such as green being unlucky in one place or holy in another, are real customs. They sit on top of the shared pattern and do not replace it.

Association is not feeling

These studies measure what people associate with a colour word, which is not the same as what they feel when they see the colour. People with red-green colour blindness give much the same answers as everyone else, which suggests how much is carried by language: seeing red, feeling blue, green with envy. Idioms differ between languages, and associations follow them. Any claim that a colour causes an emotion needs different evidence, from experiments that measure mood or behaviour, and those results are considerably weaker.

Sources and further reading

• Color symbolism on Wikipedia
• Jonauskaite and others, Colour-emotion associations in individuals with red-green colour blindness, PeerJ (2021)
• Elliot, Color and psychological functioning: a review of theoretical and empirical work, Frontiers in Psychology (2015)