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

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-10-11 10:01

International

Photo by Stella Jacob on Unsplash

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.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Across the world, people consistently associate colours and emotions, like yellow with joy, red with love and anger, black with sadness. However, such associations do not imply that colours make one feel these emotions. Unfortunately, there are few controlled studies testing causal links between colours and emotions. Thus, we immersed participants in virtual rooms of red and blue colours and assessed their emotions, also physiologically. We found that participants experienced an increased physiological arousal in red (vs. blue) and dark (vs. medium light) rooms. Thus, colours impact felt emotions, at least when comparing four red and four blue VR rooms.

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Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Zurich, Switzerland, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Funder: We thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for making this research possible through the following grants: M.L.W. was funded with SNSF professorship grants (grant nos PP00P1_170511 and PP00P1_202674), supporting M.L.W. doctoral studies; D.J. was supported with the Doc.CH and Postdoc.Mobility fellowship grants (grant nos P0LAP1_175055; P500PS_202956; P5R5PS_217715); and C.M. was supported with a project grant (grant no 100014_182138).

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