Estudos quantitativos da psicologia das cores: Saliências mentais, preferência por termos básicos e composições complexas

Abstract

This thesis aims to study different psychological aspects of color: what are the most salient colors mentally; what is the personal preference of the most salient colors; how is the colorimetric distribution of urban graffiti in the city of São Paulo, Brazil; what is the preference for different colorimetric graffiti configurations. The psychophysical approach used to quantify these mental attributes allowed the construction of interval scales, where the distances between the points are given in standard deviation units, providing a quantitative level access to information, easy to be used in different groups where comparisons are desired. . One hundred thirty-eight adults (mean age = 22.7; SD = 1.9) and two hundred twentyfive children (mean age = 8.9; SD = 2.3) completed a task consisting of writing a list of color names that had only one term. For children at the beginning of literacy, the test was performed orally, and the researcher wrote down the answers. The data were analyzed using Thurstone's Ranking Method, which allowed applying his Law of Comparative Judgment to create an interval scale where the distances of the measured points are represented in units of standard deviation of the sample. For adults, the most salient color term was blue and the least violet, with 3.51 units between them. For children, these two terms meet at 3.67 units. Significant differences between adults and children occurred for white, brown, pink, orange, gray and violet.In a second study, possible relationships between the terms of the most salient colors found in adults and children in the previous study with their respective preferences were verified, using the same psychophysical methodological approach. Three hundred adults completed a internet-based test (mean age = 30 years; SD = 1.02), and fifty-two children completed the same test in person (23 6-year-olds; 29 7-year-olds; 32 girls). The task consisted of ordering the eight most salient colors, displayed in squares, each filled with a single color, on the computer screen, according to personal preference. With the exception of red, all