The yellow color makes people happy when the sky is grey
Yellow is generally the colour of joyful and joyful emotions. But according to a new study, not all people associate sunny shade with good vibrations.
To find out what factors might play a role, the researchers tested a new hypothesis: What if people's physical environment affected their feelings about certain colours? For example, if someone lived in a cold and rainy Finland, would they think differently about the yellow colour of someone who lived near the Sahara desert?
The researchers examined data on colour emotion from an ongoing international survey of 6,625 people in 55 countries. The survey asks participants to rate 12 colours according to their degree of association with feelings such as joy, pride, fear and shame.
The darker the shadow on the map below, the more likely people are to associate the colour yellow with happy emotions. Overall, people were more likely to associate yellow with joy when they lived in countries that were wetter and further from the equator, according to researchers in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
The team only examined the data for yellow and analyzed how different factors - including hours of sunshine, hours of daylight and amount of rain - aligned with the emotions people reported for colour. The two best predictors of what people thought of yellow were the annual amount of rain and the distance to the equator, the team reported this month in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
The further away from the equator, the more likely one was to appreciate certain bright nuances: in Egypt, the probability of yellow being associated with joy was only 5.7%, while in Finland it was 87.7% in the cold. In the United States, where the climate is temperate and the waves of amber cereals are high, people's yellow-yellow association rates range from 60% to 70%.
The team also checked whether the associations changed with the season - for example, whether people in a certain country liked yellow more in winter than in summer. The researchers found that opinions on colour remained relatively constant throughout the year - even when the weather changed, the data on yellow-yellow associations were as good as gold.
