The Effect of Color Scheme on Mood Fiza Mujib Moosa PYC 217 Lab Report Dr. Grace Truong 3rd Dec, 2022
Abstract In this paper we were interested in whether colors have an impact on the mood of people. Stemming from the color-in-context theory, people often feel different emotions when exposed to different colors. In particular it was interesting how different color schemes had an impact on mood. We conducted a research on university students where participants were given a questionnaire to fill after observing images with different color schemes. The color scheme was the independent variable and mood was the dependent variable. The results indicate that both light and dark color schemes show positive mood but lighter color schemes are correlated to positive mood to a greater extent. Introduction Colors in the environment are prevalent in our daily lives, from our homes, nature, hospitals, workspaces etc, we are exposed to endless color schemes. Oftentimes we associate certain places to certain emotions and memories. Can the color scheme of the places induce these emotions or play the role as a confound variable when we often correlate these emotions to these places? It is important to identify the setting and plan the appropriate color scheme while designing these spaces. As a construct this widespread, does color have effects on other areas like emotions, cognition, sensation, perception and development ?. According to Goldstein (1939), particular colors can induce a range of different emotional reactions. In our research we were particularly interested in the effect of different color schemes on people's mood.
In the study done by Carruthers et al (2010), participants who identified as healthy, depressed and anxious were divided into 3 groups and were asked to chose the color scheme which described their mood and it was found that depending on brightness and saturation, colors from the same color family (such as blues or reds) had very different implications for people in terms of their positivity or negativity (i.e. dark purple versus pale purple). Dark greens and dark reds are two examples of similar shades from distinct color families that are more likely to have the same connotation as various shades from the same color group. Based on this study, which showed that anxious and sad people were drawn to the color gray and healthy participants to the color yellow, we made certain color choices for our experiment. It is remarkable that those who were in good health tended to select saturated hues, whereas those who were anxious and depressed tended to select desaturated hues. We were curious whether similar results would be found in individuals with a record of no mental health issues and whether these results would coincide with our hypothesis that lighter colors are associated with positive feelings while darker colors are associated with negative feelings. Methods Participants The participants in the study were university students. There were 22 participants. One participant mentioned that they were color blind, which was noted by the experimenters. All the participants belonged to