Colors of Fear

Abstract

Man’s ability to use his senses has allowed him to adapt and interact with his environment, thus allowing him to live. However, this is a purely pragmatic approach to our senses and their use. An interesting approach has to do with how our senses, and what we perceive through them can alter and affect our emotional state. Here we examine how different colors, when presented visually, affect fear response. For the requirements of this experiment 24 undergraduate students were selected to participate. All were psychology majors and attended the American College of Greece. The result revealed significant difference between colors and the levels of fear they elicited, with those colors associated with negative feeling, eliciting more fearful responses.

The Effects of colors on levels of fear

Man’s ability to touch and feel, taste, see, hear, smell has allowed him to adapt and interact with his environment, thus allowing him to live. However, this is a purely pragmatic approach to our senses and their use. A more interesting approach has to do with how our senses, and what we perceive through them can alter and affect our emotional state.

Colors convey emotions. Here we will focus on the colors and the emotions they invoke when presented in words. In essence when we use our vision in order to perceive them. In everyday life we have seen that we use expressions that clearly connect colors with emotions. Such examples include that one is feeling blue, meaning, he is sad, or that he turned green with envy (Terwogt & Hoeksma, 1995).

In a study by Schachtel (1943; cited in Terwogt & Hoeksma, 1995), any connection between colors and emotions stems from a purely subjective experience. Nevertheless, this explanation does not account for the way that specific colors are related to specific emotions and emotional states in any given society and culture. Gerard (1957; cited in Terwogt & Hoeksma, 1995) attempted to answer this by saying that for instance, the color red is tied to the emotion of anger and this is due to the common physiological reaction patterns that these to cause.

Other studies have tried to identify the relationship between colors and emotion that stem out of cultures. According to Dьrsteler (2002), ‘although there is a psychology of colour and some of them have universal emotional effects, in most cases their meanings are culture dependent’. There is a strong cultural component when we associate colours and emotions. Take the case of the colour green. In China it is associated with death, whereas, in the Western world the colour black is associated with death. Moreover, colours are typically divided into warm (yellows, reds, oranges) and cool ones (blues, greens and violets). Here we will state, some of the colours and the meanings associated to them in the Westernised world as proposed by Dьrsteler (2002).

Red: danger, excitement, fire, passion, blood, fight or flight, some sexual connotation.

Purple: Wealth, royalty, sophistication, intelligence.

Blue: Quietness, serenity, truth, dignity, constancy, reliability, power

White: Purity, cleanness, luminosity, vacuum.

Yellow: Hatred, jealousy, cowardliness

Orange: ignorance, sluggishness and superiority.

Green: Nature, fresh, vegetation, health, green/blues are the favourites of consumers

According to Howels (1944), there is a linkage of senses commonly referred to as synesthesia. This means that stimuli that normally trigger a response in one kind of receptor, they may trigger