Investigating the interaction between the processing of colour and emotion

This dissertation examines the bidirectional interaction between the processing of colour and emotion stimuli. Several broad premises of the colour-in-context theory (Elliot & Maier, 2012) stipulate that colour, consisting of meaningful associations, automatically influences, and is influenced by, our psychological functioning. Colour has been suggested to have emotional connotations (Moller et al., 2009), however certain premises of the colour-in-context theory have not been investigated in the context of emotion. Further, although the processing of emotional facial expressions is influenced by the background colour on which they are presented (Gil & Le Bigot, 2015; Young et al., 2013), specifically, red backgrounds produce a bias towards negative-affect judgements and green towards positive-affect judgements, it remains unclear whether this influence of affective colour connotations occurs automatically. In addition, emotional contexts can drive how we see and remember the world around us by influencing attention (Anderson et al., 2011) and memory (Barrett & Kensinger, 2010). However, the limited existing research investigating the effects of emotion on colour processing and judgements have produced mixed results, with the conditions necessary for emotion to influence colour processing remaining unclear (Fetterman et al., 2011; Ikeda, 2019). This dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature on the interaction between emotion and colour processing.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation provides a broad overview of the existing literature on colour, emotion, and the interaction between colour and emotion. There are three main empirical chapters following this literature review. Chapter 2 found that contextual colour influences face valence judgements for emotionally ambiguous (surprised/neutral) facial expressions when the stimulus presentation duration is constrained (Experiment 1), and that this effect remains when the time to respond is also constrained (Experiment 2). Further, congruency effects were found for categorisation accuracy and response times for unambiguous emotional expressions (angry/happy) displayed on coloured backgrounds (red/green) (Experiment 3). Chapter 3 found categorisation of emotional face primes influenced the subsequent categorisation of red–green colour stimuli. Notably, this effect of emotional priming remained irrespective of the difficulty of the colour categorisation task. Further, Chapter 4 found that merely holding emotional faces in working memory failed to bias memory for coloured stimuli. Interestingly, participants who naturally chose to mimic the facial expressions on their faces showed a memory bias for emotion-congruent coloured stimuli, no such effect was found among non-mimickers (Experiment 1). This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 in which participants were randomly allocated to either a mimicking or control (labelling) condition. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by discussing and interpreting the empirical findings of this dissertation with respect to the colour-in-context theory. Specifically, the findings support the premise that colours have emotional connotations (Premise 1) that automatically influence face valence judgements (Premises 2 & 3). Further, support is provided for emotion to influence colour judgements and memory (Premise 5). However, these effects only emerge under specific conditions. These findings have important implications for the colour and emotion literature and highlight avenues for future research that have the potential to guide the use of colour in the real world.