Association of emotions and feelings with colours

[Saarthak Haldar]

How emotions are associated with colours and why certain people love / attracted toward certain colours ?

Is it because we started seeing colours when we were evolving .

We also started analysing colours when we born .

and since then we have seen open spaces full of sun light and other bright lights and we have also seen closed spaces with dark colours . We have seen red colour in blood and if spilled somewhere , indicated that someone of our species has been harmed ,  making us alert .

So we were programmed to act in certain way when we see colours and hence our evolution has occurred with certain hormones making our emotions to flow while seeing colours .

 

Now these are embedded in our brains and brain memorized those colours and incidences associated with them .

Sometimes associations are acquired after birth hence associated with some of our personal incidences .

So when we see certain colours we feel emotions as the memory triggers those specific emotions .

As red increases focus because it triggers alertness because red associated with danger .

Light blue , a colour of openness fills us with many thoughts and is relaxing , so enhance creativity .

Our conscious memory is formed by parts like amygdala  , involved in emotional learning and prefrontal cortex and hippocampus associated with the consolidation and retrieval of emotional memory .

But this association of colours and  emotions is due to the subconscious memory . Like perirhinal cortex , partially involved in conscious memory and also in ( mostly conceptual ) unconscious memory . There are many different parts which are associated with subconscious memory formation with colours .

Hence our emotions by seeing colours is due to subconscious memory .

.: Why we love colours .?

 

Is it because the colours are associated with different incidence so triggers different emotions .

The people who love certain colours , actually love the subconscious feeling associated with the colours .

[Phi for All]

I'd be very careful about overgeneralizing your thoughts on color. Do you have evidence from a study showing that light blue makes us all creative, or that we all associate red with danger?

I've always considered color as one aspect of our pattern-recognition abilities. We make sense of the world around us by comparing it with things we already know, things we've experienced in the past that allow us to predict successful patterns in situations that are new to us. If you look at a green ball, you already recognize enough of its pattern to know several things about it, including whether or not it would fit in your hand, and that if tossed it will roll better than a cube, and that it will be hard to see in the grass because it's green. 

Do you have any studies that suggest consistent emotions are triggered by certain colors? I can easily imagine a sort of pleasure that's felt when one recognizes a particular pattern, but other than that I'm having a hard time thinking of any color that evokes a consistent emotion from people. Again, is there any evidence that emotions associated with color aren't subjective to each individual?

[Saarthak Haldar]

No, I myself don't have any evidence but I have read this in numerous articles on colour psychology that colors evoke specific emotions and feelings. 

so I hypothesized that may be it's because of evolutionary trait.

But, thanks for replying and sharing your thoughts. 

[Phi for All]

15 minutes ago, Saarthak Haldar said:

No, I myself don't have any evidence but I have read this in numerous articles on colour psychology that colors evoke specific emotions and feelings. 

so I hypothesized that may be it's because of evolutionary trait.

If this is a function of high intelligence, it's most definitely affected by the evolutionary process. But you also claim the association is due to subconscious memory, which is subjective to an individual, and evolution is about change within a whole population over time. 

I found a study through Google Scholar that may offer some insight, but it's more of a psychological treatment than an evolutionary one. I haven't read it myself, but the abstract seemed relevant: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115035

Quote

The review clearly shows that color can carry important meaning and can have an important impact on people's affect, cognition, and behavior.

 

[AlexCaro]

I think association between colors and memories/emotions is different and depends on individual's life.

 

There are a lot of studies in psychology about color's influence on perception