Emotional Context and Color Perception and Recognition by 12- and 16-years-old Children

Abstract

Will the emotional context in which a painting is placed impact how well adolescents remember the colors in it? Will there be differences in color perception and recognition based on age and gender? Specific materials had to be designed to answer this question: (a) an abstract, themeless painting composed of twelve colors, each covering the same area with the same number of pixels, and (b) four texts with different emotional connotations (fear, anger, happiness, and sadness) describing the lives of fictitious painters. After being pretested, the material was proposed to 142 seventh-grade students and 71 tenth-grade students. Each subject studied a painting and heard one of the four texts. Next, the painting was taken away; after this, the subjects ordered the twelve colors based on how much area they thought each one covered the painting. It was hypothesized that the subjects would give greater importance to specific colors depending on the emotional context induced by the associated text. The results confirmed this hypothesis, although the tenth graders were less affected by the emotional context than the seventh graders. There was no statistically significant effect of gender in either population.