Seeing red: does the colour of a room affect how you feel?

Popular belief says that colours impact people's emotions, but there has been little scientific evidence to back this up. Using virtual reality, researchers put 60 participants into red and blue rooms of varying lightness and saturation, and looked at their physiological responses. They found that heart rates and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark rooms than in the medium lightness rooms, and skin conductance - a good proxy for emotional arousal - increased more in the red than in the blue rooms. The authors say that the research is promising in demonstrating that wall colours have an impact on how we feel (at least in a virtual space), but that much more work needs to be done before the results can be transferred to other domains such as interior design or healthcare.