Official Color-Emotion relations

Question

I'm trying to find colors that trigger different sort of emotions for people. I keep finding different answers for different colors.

Ex. Some say blue means friendly and calm. Others say that green means calm but not blue?

Is there an official chart for this that is backed up by research?

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Edit:

I am a blogger so I am trying to analyze what colors I need to use in order for my audience to understand what I'm saying.

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Another edit

I feel bad for not adding this. lol My blog is about learning how to blog and increasing traffic. I'm trying to learn more about color theory so that I know what colors to use to catch people's eye. Here are specific examples:

1. Landing page color button
2. Background colors to induce trust
3. colors that try to show creativity

Does that help?

Answer 1

Not really, that would be too easy!

Because there are several factors which can influence the emotion from the color. I have several in mind:

• One of them is cultural background, as norms and habits, and thus cultural value, meaning, may change between people for a same color (interindividual differences).

• Another one is context, as color preference may be affected by the field where it's used. For a bold example, black color would look "nice" on a luxury ad, but not so much for an health communication (intrapersonal differences). See also Bonnardel, N., Piolat, A., & Le Bigot, L. (2011). The impact of colour websites on appealing and users’ cognitive processes. Displays, 32, 2, 69-80.

• And you also have physiological issues. Color perception is affected by surrounding other colors (see Johannes Itten). Therefore the emotion would change as well. As a result, it may be more relevant to elicit the emotional impact of a set of colors instead of one only. Also there are several strategies to make colors fit together.

• Also in a physiological view, some people have color deficiency, and it may therefore affect their "emotional perception" (I don't have any reference on that, just a personal hypothesis).

So, what I would suggest is to test the emotions elicited by a specific set of colors, for a specific field/context, for a specific audience. You would therefore get some clues for those conditions.

Answer 2

"Color codes" would be most often arbitrary, or depend on culture. "Blue means friendly and calm " is absolutely arbitrary. Naturally, it does not mean we take the opposite for the "meaning". Colors are not words, and there is not any "official" or standardized color interpretation.

I simply like blue, but to think about it, I would say it has to be it makes a balanced impression on my retinas. And it is good for work with longer texts: a blue background and yellow font make a contrast comparable with that between black and white, on screen. Green is quite well-toned for backgrounds, too.

If you think about a website, white backgrounds with black font have more impact on the eye, so visitors might avoid prolonged exposure.