Blue hues don't bring the blues: questioning conventional notions of color–emotion associations

Abstract

It is commonly held that yellow is happy and blue is sad, but the reason remains unclear. Part of the problem is that researchers tend to focus on understanding why yellow is happy and blue is sad, but this may be a misleading characterization of color-emotion associations. In this study, we disentangle the contribution of lightness, chroma, and hue in color-happy/sad associations by controlling for lightness and chroma either statistically or colorimetrically. We found that after controlling for lightness and chroma, colors with blue hue were no sadder than colors with yellow hue, and in some cases, colors with blue hue were actually happier. These results can help guide future efforts to understand the nature of color-emotion associations.

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