Color-Emotion Mappings and their Demographic Dependencies in Digital Environment: Online Test Evidence Using MS Paint7 Color Palette

Abstract

. With some overlapping and contradicting results a number of studies have demonstrated that there is an interrelation between colors and emotions. Some studies conclude that colors and other aesthetic effects are strong emotion triggers inducing affective reaction when interacting with interfaces or webpages. Our study tests color-emotion mappings in interface environments within a modified framework of Ou et al. (2004a, b, c) applying a rating task in an in-group quasi-experimental setting for colors selected from a typical color scheme (MS Paint 7 Palette) used in digital environments. We have characterized and grouped the tested colors with respect to evaluation tendencies regarding emotion association pairs - polar adjectives used in the rating task. Correlations between colors that are evaluated similarly with respect to emotion association pairs as well as emotion association pairs evaluated similarly with respect to the tested colors have also been detected and discussed in the study. The study contributes to the interrelated areas of interface usability and design analysis, usability improvement, and interface color categorization. The results show that perception of color-emotion mappings is age and gender dependent.