A Historically Based Review of Empirical Work on Color and Psychological Functioning: Content, Methods, and Recommendations for Future Research

Abstract

Empirical work on color and psychological functioning has a long history, dating back to the 19th century. This early research focused on five different areas: Arousal, physical strength, preference, time perception, and attention. In the present paper, I overview the relations observed in this early research, and detail methodological weaknesses therein. I then trace subsequent 20th and 21st century developments in these research areas, in terms of both content and methods. Finally, I extend the review to cover the full breadth of research in this domain of inquiry, and provide guidelines for interpreting existing work and conducting future work. Thus, this historically based review tells us much about research on color and psychological functioning, including where it started, where it has been, where it is, and where it can go.

Processing the Word Red and Intellectual Performance: Four Replication Attempts

“…Our results suggest that the latter seems more likely. On the other hand, Elliot (2015Elliot ( , 2019 emphasized that only a precise combination of luminance, chroma, and hue is expected to produce intellectual impairment. According to this line of reasoning, simply reading the word red should not elicit any cognitive effects.…”

Color and Categorical Claims

“…In psychology, publication bias is rife (Ferguson & Brannick, 2012;Ferguson & Heene, 2012), raising the possibility that many more studies were conducted and found evidence of no difference. To address this as well as to reduce the analytical flexibility that yields many false positives, preregistration is an absolute must for this literature going forward (Nosek et al, 2018), as are the color-related methodological prescriptions laid out by Elliot (2019).…”

“…Perhaps as a result of the unwarranted generalizations made in the literature, typically studies do not use the same exact hue as any previous study, and at this point there is little idea whether this accounts for discrepancies in results. Given the existence of this as well as the multiple other methodological issues detailed by Elliot (2019), researchers in the area have a lot of work ahead of them if the literature is to provide reliable and useful results.…”

“…In a recent issue of the Review of General Psychology, Elliot (2019) reviews our knowledge of the effect of color on psychological functioning. The relevant literature is large.…”

“…The cells that contain melanopsin are involved in synchronising our internal circadian clock to the external lightdark cycle given by the Earth's rotation. Melanopsin stimulation may thus affect arousal -and arousal is a frequent topic of study in the literature reviewed by Elliot (2019).…”