Seeing red as anger or romance: an emotion categorisation task

Abstract

The colour red has heterogeneous connotations that includes associations with both anger and romance. Two experiments were conducted where we contrasted the colour red associated with anger-related words to the colour yellow associated with joy-related words (Experiment 1), and in contrast with the colour pink associated with romance-related words (Experiment 2), using an emotion categorisation task. The analyses were conducted across both participants and items. In Experiment 1, we found clear facilitative effects for categorisation of anger-related words in red font and joy-related words in yellow font. This highlights the robust nature of the red-anger and yellow-joy pairings. In Experiment 2, we similarly found clear facilitative categorisation of anger-related words in red font. However, for romance-related words mixed results were found that illustrate the degree of competition involved in categorising romance-related words in red and pink fonts due to overlapping semantic connotations and colour hue similarity.