5 th International Color and Coatings Congress (ICCC 2013) December 18-19, 2013 Isfahan–Iran A Study of colour emotion for two colour combinations Samaneh Dashti Department of Textile Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan 84156-83111, Iran Dashti_Sama@yahoo.com Abstract Colour is often claimed to be the most emotional appearance factor of a product so researcher have been conducted to obtain the relationship between colour and emotion. To do this, a psychophysical experiment was carried out to investigate colour emotion for two-colour combination. Five colour emotion scales warm- cool, heavy-light, active-passive, like-dislike and harmony-disharmonious were investigated on 190 colour pairs with 51 Iranian observers. According to the results obtained from the correlation coefficients, it seems that there is no gender, culture, nationality, environment, educational background and age effect on the three colour emotion scales, which make the Li Chen Ou’s colour emotion space, warm-cool, heavy-light and active-passive. However, apart from the gender, these factors affect the response of the observers to the like- dislike scale and it means colour preference is likely to be affected by these factors. Also Iranian prefer the colour pairs with small hue difference and those with high average of their chroma. The application of the Li Chen Ou’s proposed models of colour emotion for the Iranian results showed there is no good prediction for the heavy-light, like-dislike and harmony-disharmonious scales. Introduction In the real life, colour is always seen in combination with other colours and it is virtually impossible to see colours individually. Even in a psychophysical experiment and under a light cabinet the samples are observed in combination with the background colour, which is normally a great with . On the basis of appearance models, the colour of a sample is affected by the colour of neighbourhood samples, and consequently, the colour emotion imposed by that sample can be changed, accordingly [1]. The Cupchik model considers two levels of emotional responses: reactive and reflective. The reactive level describes the emotional responses to the configurations of features in visual arts and in this level, apart from the product application, a relationship between emotion and colours are available. However, in the reflective level, the application of the product affects the human emotional response [2]. Method In this experiment, each colour pair on a uniform gray background showed to the observers by in random sequenceon a CRT monitor situared in a darkened room. For each observer a total of 190 colour pairs were presented. All the colour pairs were generated from the 20 colour samples that used in Li Chen Ou’s teses [1]. The 190 colour pairs were assessed on 5 colour emotion scales, warm-cool, heavy-light, active-passive, like-dislike and harmony-disharmonious. Table 1 summarized the variation in the observer groups. 51 observers, comprising different culture in Iran and consisted of young and older adults. Observers from Yazd consisted of 11 with a design background and 19 non design. Table 1: number of observers for each group taking part in this study Culture female male design non design young old (20-29) (30-47) Yazd 16 9 11 14 19 7 Isfahan 6 6 0 12 12 0 Others 8 6 0 14 13 0 Results and discussion Experimental results were transformed into z scores. The result show there was not any Significant effect of gender on the colour emotion. About effect of culture on the colour emotion, the result show good correlation coefficient for this colour emotion scales expect like-dislike. To see whether such effect was related to the appearance of each colour pair, the like-dislike response given by Iranian observers compared with various CIELAB values for each colour pair, such as mean and different values of an appearance attribute between a colour pair.