The relationship between color–object associations and color preference: Further investigation of ecological valence theory

Ecological valence theory (EVT; Palmer & Schloss, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:8877–8882, 2010) proposes that color preferences are due to affective responses to color-associated objects: That is, people generally like colors to the degree that they like the objects associated with those colors. Palmer and Schloss found that the average valence of objects associated with a color, when weighted by how well the objects matched the color (weighted affective valence estimates: WAVE) explained 80% of the variation in preference across colors. Here, we replicated and extended Palmer and Schloss’s investigation to establish whether color–object associations can account for sex differences in color preference and whether the relationship between associated objects and color preference is equally strong for males and females. We found some degree of sex specificity to the WAVEs, but the relationship between WAVE and color preference was significantly stronger for males than for females (74% shared variance for males, 45% for females). Furthermore, analyses identified a significant inverse relationship between the number of objects associated with a color and preference for the color. Participants generally liked colors associated with few objects and disliked colors associated with many objects. For the sample overall and for females alone, this association was not significantly weaker than the association of the WAVE and preference. The success of the WAVE at capturing color preference was partly due to the relationship between the number of associated objects and color preference. The findings identify constraints of EVT in its current form, but they also provide general support for the link between color preference and color–object associations.     

Relation of personality characteristics and color preferences

150 students responded to the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule and ranked color plates from the Luscher Color Test. Regression analysis yielded no relationship of predictive significance between the two sets of variables. An ancillary analysis using sets of random numbers in place of the color preference data yielded results basically similar to those produced in the earlier analysis. Males and females rank ordered the colors identically except for yellow, which was significantly more preferred by males than females.     

The role of perception, language, and preference in the developmental acquisition of basic color terms

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization. Experimental tasks were designed to measure different aspects of perceptual color processing (discrimination and saliency), color preference and objective counts of color term frequency in preschool-directed language (books and mothers' speech) were used to compare the acquisition of three groups of colors: primary colors, secondary colors (orange, pink, and purple) that appear at the same time as the primary colors, and secondary colors (brown and gray) that appear late. Although our results suggest that perception does not directly shape young children's color term acquisition, we found that children prefer brown and gray significantly less than basic colors and that these color terms appear significantly less often in child-directed speech, suggesting that color preference, linguistic input, and developing color cognition may be linked.     

A method for constructing an objective eye color chart

Detailed instructions for constructing an eye-color chart that represents a normal range of human eye colors are provided. The chart is composed of photographic color slides of human irises, magnified to 3.6 × life-aize. Iris images are sequenced according to their color and measured opacity. This enables researchers to reliably classify subjects’ Ms pigmentation according to both color and darkness. The eye color chart is easy to use and is highly reliable (between-observers measurements r ? .94). The photographic arrangement is also useful for obtaining magnified photographs of irises for documentation and illustration purposes.     

Aesthetic preference and lateral dominance

Aesthetic preferences for photographs with the main focal content either to the left or right of the photograph's center were examined in right- and left-handed subjects. Verbal responses or manual responses were required. In one experiment with 261 introductory psychology student-subjects, left-handers more often preferred photographs with the more important part on the left ("left-geared") than did right-handers. Exp. 2, involving 84 right-handed student subjects, showed that left-geared photographs presented on the left side were preferred more often than left-geared photographs presented on the right side, and left-geared photographs presented on the left side were more often chosen when a left-handed manual response was required. Interactions between handedness, position of the stimulus, language hemisphere, and response mode make it extremely difficult to ascertain whether the right hemisphere is really more involved in aesthetic decisions.     

Children's attention to stimulus components with variation in relative salience of components and degree of stimulus integration

A total of 400 children at ages 5, 9, and 12 years were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Relative salience of these two stimulus components was manipulated across subjects in two ways: the standard shapes and colors from previous studies were compared with standard shapes in fluorescent colors, and the latter materials were compared with nonsense shapes in fluorescent colors. While fluorescence of color had little effect, the replacement of standard shapes with nonsense figures caused attention to be redirected from shape to color as the primary cue for learning. This effect was more pronounced at age 9 than at age 5. Apparently there is a greater tendency for older than for younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component such as shape, when it is advantageous to adopt another feature such as color as the primary functional cue. An additional variable was integration of components (color within shape vs color as background for shape). Integration produced generally greater attention to color but did not affect the general pattern of salience effects.     

All set! Evidence of simultaneous attentional control settings for multiple target colors

Although models of visual search have often assumed that attention can only be set for a single feature or property at a time, recent studies have suggested that it may be possible to maintain more than one attentional control setting. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether spatial attention could be guided by multiple attentional control settings for color. In a standard spatial cueing task, participants searched for either of two colored targets accompanied by an irrelevantly colored distractor. Across five experiments, results consistently showed that nonpredictive cues matching either target color produced a significant spatial cueing effect, while irrelevantly colored cues did not. This was the case even when the target colors could not be linearly separated from irrelevantly cue colors in color space, suggesting that participants were not simply adopting one general color set that included both target colors. The results could not be explained by intertrial priming by previous targets, nor could they be explained by a single inhibitory set for the distractor color. Overall, the results are most consistent with the maintenance of multiple attentional control settings.     

Association between synesthetic colors and sensitivity to physical colors changed by type of synesthetic experience in grapheme-color synesthesia

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a condition in which visual perception of letters induces simultaneous perception of a specific color. Previous studies indicate that grapheme-color synesthetes are more sensitive to physical colors than non-synesthetes. Synesthetic colors are found to be concentrated in multiple regions of the color space, forming “synesthetic color clusters”. The present study investigated whether color sensitivity corresponding to synesthetic color clusters (clustered colors) is higher than color sensitivity that does not correspond to synesthetic color clusters (non-clustered colors). However, we found no difference in the color sensitivity for clustered and non-clustered colors. We also investigated whether the color sensitivity is dependent on the synesthetic experience (associators and projectors). We found that the greater the tendency toward associator characteristics, the greater the sensitivity for clustered colors compared to that for non-clustered colors. Our findings suggest an association between synesthetic colors and physical color sensitivity that is modulated by synesthetic experience.     

Children’s incidental learning of the colors of objects and clothing

Few researchers have examined adults’ and children’s incidental recall of color information. In Experiment 1, we examined how well children recalled the colors of items seen in a first aid demonstration. Color recall of objects was above chance levels after three different time delays. However, recall of clothing color was poor. In Experiment 2, we examined whether colors of items from the same category (e.g., items of clothing) were more difficult to remember than distinct items (i.e., belonging to a range of different categories). Children and adults saw 18 items from three different categories. Color recall was above chance levels. The colors of distinct items were recalled more often than the color of category items. The results suggest that color is encoded automatically to some extent. However, participants had difficulty in recalling the color of clothing worn by the experimenter.     

Black Beauty: Skin Color and Body Images among African-American College Women1

Skin color has played an historically influential role in the lives of African Americans. The present study examined the role of skin color (i. e., its lightness-darkness) as it pertained to various body-image measures among 66 light-, medium-, and darkskinned Black college females. A Skin Color Assessment Procedure was developed to assess various perceptual dimensions of skin color. Although subjects were generally satisfied with their skin tone, the idealization of lightness was apparent in several respects. Those who desired a different skin tone favored being lighter more than being darker. Unlike light- and dark-skinned Black females, medium-toned Black females' held personal ideals that were significantly lighter than their self-perceived color. The majority of subjects believed that Black men found light skin most attractive. Although actual skin color did not predict various facets of body image satisfaction, skin color satisfaction was positively related to satisfaction with overall appearance and with the face. Future research should address the possible mediating role of racial identity vis-a-vis the effects of skin color and racial physiognomy on body image.     

Cross-modality matches between color and size differences

Eighteen undergraduates, 9 males and 9 females, were asked to make two geometric figures appear as different as two primary colors. They adjusted the size of one of the figures. There was a significant relation between the ratio of wave lengths of the colors and the ratios produced between the figures. Females tended to see a given color pair as more different than males.     

Attractiveness of blonde women in evolutionary perspective: studies with two Polish samples

An experimental study was undertaken to assess the phenomenon of male preference for blondes. In the first study, 360 Polish men ages 18 to 46 years were asked to assess the attractiveness of the presented stimuli using a 9-point scale. Stimuli were 9 different pictures of the same women whose ages (about 20, 30, and 40 years old) and hair colors (blonde, brown, and brunette) were manipulated. Pictures of blonde-haired women were generally rated as younger than the others. The attractiveness ratings of female faces changed with age and hair color. Still, only the 30-yr.-old woman with blonde hair was rated as significantly more attractive than those with brown or brunette hair. In a second study (the analysis of 500 Internet advertisements) mature women dyed their hair blonde more frequently. These results are analyzed with regard to the evolutionarily formed male preference for younger females.     

Emotion, memory, and attention in the taboo Stroop paradigm

This study tested the binding hypothesis: that emotional reactions trigger binding mechanisms that link an emotional event to salient contextual features such as event location, a frequently recalled aspect of naturally occurring flash-bulb memories. Our emotional events were taboo words in a Stroop color-naming task, and event location was manipulated by presenting the words in different task-irrelevant screen locations. Seventy-two participants named the font color of taboo and neutral words, with instructions to ignore word meaning; in one condition, several words were location consistent (i.e., always occupied the same screen location), whereas in another condition, several colors were location consistent. Then, in a surprise recognition memory test, participants recalled the locations of location-consistent words or colors. Although attention enhanced overall location memory for colors (the attended dimension during color naming), emotion (taboo vs. neutral words) enhanced location memory for words but not colors. These results support the binding hypothesis but contradict the hypothesis that emotional events induce image-like memories more often than non-emotional events.     

Effect of depth of processing on recognition memory for normal and inverted photographs of faces

40 undergraduates categorized photographs of faces on the basis of sex or liking and then attempted to recognize them in normal or inverted orientations. For photographs which were normally oriented, accuracy and confidence were greater for pictures initially categorized for liking than for pictures initially categorized for sex. However, for inverted photographs, accuracy and confidence scores did not differ as a function of initial judgement, although they were generally poorer for the inverted than normal faces. Finally, subjects more often correctly recalled the initial category for normal than for inverted photographs, although both levels were close to chance. These findings are interpreted as being more consistent with a semantic than a feature model of facial representation.     

Self-posed behaviors of females and males in photographs

In a previous study, Ragan (1982) found systematic sex differences in the poses of persons photographed by professional photographers. In this study, 34 female and 34 male subjects posed themselves for a confederate, allegedly a photography student, who took the photographs from which data were drawn to assess sex differences in self-posed photographs. A MANOVA revealed overall significance with females smiling, canting, and orientating away from the camera more than males. An ANOVA produced significant sex differences for only the smiling data. Results are discussed in terms of Goffman's (1976) suggestion that photographers introduce their distortions into photographs and in terms of Duval and Wicklund's theory of objective self-awareness (1972).The author gratefully acknowledges the photographic assistance of Pam Bugg, Clay Langley, Jim Hamilton, and Susan Moore.     

Ecologically relevant stimuli and color memory

Ecologically relevant stimuli were developed as an alternative to Munsell color chips. Colored pictures of familiar objects were used to study color memory. We investigated the typicality of color to particular objects. Contextually typical colors were remembered more accurately than atypical colors were. Moreover, this variable had a stronger effect on memory than focality did. We concluded that memory for ecologically relevant material is more impressed by a color's relation to experience than by its intrinsic properties.     

Effectiveness of color in picture recognition memory

Investigations were conducted into the effectiveness of color in picture recognition memory. In the study phase, half of the pictures were presented in color and the other half in black and white. In the test phase, half were presented in the same color mode as the study pictures and the other half in the other mode. In immediate and 1-week-delayed tests, the recognition performance was highest when color pictures were used in both the study and test phases. The recall for the color mode of the study pictures, however, was not as good, even with the color pictures. This suggests that the effectiveness of color in picture recognition is not necessarily due to the memory for colors in the pictures themselves, but is probably due to the distinctiveness of features highlighted by the colors. We also found that in the recall performance for the color mode it was more difficult to detect the deletion of colors than to detect their addition.     

Filling a gap in the semantic gradient: Color associates and response set effects in the Stroop task

In the Stroop task, incongruent color associates (e.g., LAKE) interfere more with color identification than neutral words do (e.g., SEAT). However, color associates have historically been related to colors in the response set. Response set membership is an important factor in Stroop interference, because color words in the response set interfere more than color words not in the response set. It has not been established whether response set membership plays a role in the ability of a colorassociate to interfere with color identification. This issue was addressed in two experiments (one using vocal responses and one using manual responses) by comparing the magnitude of interference caused by color associates related to colors in the response set with that of interference caused by color associates unrelated to colors in the response set. The results of both experiments show that color associates unrelated to colors in the response set interfered with color identification more than neutral words did. However, the amount of interference was less than that from color associates that were related to colors in the response set. In addition, this pattern was consistent across response modalities. These results are discussed with respect to various theoretical accounts of Stroop interference.     

EFFECTS OF CATEGORIZATION ON COLOR PERCEPTION

Abstract— Subjects were shown simple objects and were asked to reproduce the colors of the objects Even though the objects remained on the screen while subjects reproduced the colors and the objects' shapes were irrelevant to the subjects' task, subjects' color perceptions were influenced by the shape category of an object. For example, objects that belonged to categories with redder objects were judged to be more red than identically colored objects belonging to another category. Further experiments showed that the object categories that subjects use, rather than being fixed, depend on the objects to which subjects are exposed.     

The effects of environmental context on recognition memory and claims of remembering

Recognition memory for words was tested in same or different contexts using the remember/know response procedure. Context was manipulated by presenting words in different screen colors and locations and by presenting words against real-world photographs. Overall hit and false-alarm rates were higher for tests presented in an old context compared to a new context. This concordant effect was seen in both remember responses and estimates of familiarity. Similar results were found for rearranged pairings of old study contexts and targets, for study contexts that were unique or were repeated with different words, and for new picture contexts that were physically similar to old contexts. Similar results were also found when subjects focused attention on the study words, but a different pattern of results was obtained when subjects explicitly associated the study words with their picture context. The results show that subjective feelings of recollection play a role in the effects of environmental context but are likely based more on a sense of familiarity that is evoked by the context than on explicit associations between targets and their study context.