First, all participants found it quite easy to link colors and emotions. This was particularly true for colors like red, black, or yellow. Other colors, like brown and purple, received fewer associations. We found that colour-emotion associations were not one-to-one, but many-to-many.
Participants did not select one emotion for a colour, but often chose several emotions. In turn, different colors were linked to the same emotion, like pleasure, which was associated with red but also yellow, orange, pink, and purple.
What you can also see is that most colors were associated with positive emotions. Only brown, Grey, and black-that is, darker colors-were associated with negative emotions. Red was the most controversial colour. For some, it was a very positive colour-the colour of passion, love, and desire. For others, it was a negative colour-the colour of danger, anger, and hate. For even others, it was both positive and negative. What connects all these emotions and ideas is the fact that red is activating and strong.
Second, we found few cultural differences. In other words, many colour-emotion associations seemed universal. Most participants agreed that pink was associated with love and pleasure, yellow with joy and amusement, or that black was the saddest colour.
Third, if you are interested in cultural differences, we found some specialties too. For example, in addition to the universal associations of love and anger with red, Chinese participants also associated joy and amusement, while Nigerian participants additionally associated fear with red. Another example is the association between purple and sadness that only Greek participants chose. For others, purple was generally a positive colour with very little agreement on the exact emotions associated with purple.
Fourth, participants whose languages were more similar to each other also had more similar associations. To arrive at this finding, we estimated the degree of linguistic（语言的）similarity between two languages, which shows how related or unrelated they are. And then, languages from different language families, like English and Chinese, would have the lowest similarity scores.