A Cross-cultural study of emotional Responses on Colours

Abstract

This article investigates human’s emotional responses on coloursin Eastern Arabian Gulf culturebased on a questionnaire. Totally 10 colour options were evaluated (i.e. violet, orange, green, red, blue, yellow, black, gray, white and no color) by 80 subjects based on 12 basic descriptive variables including clean, fresh, liked, new, heavy, hard, warm, modern, active, tense, relaxing, concentration.White colour was associated with emotion: clean, new, relaxing and concentration. Yellow is associated with freshness; however, red is the most liked color. Black was linked with heavy, hard and tense emotions. Tense mood is associated with red. Insignificant differences between colourswith regard to warm mood were found. The link between colour preferences found for two topics living room and clothing and emotions elicited were discussed.Keywords: colour, preference, emotion, mood, marketing, personality, design.