A Study of Colour Emotion and Colour Preference. Part I: Colour Emotions for Single Colours Li-Chen Ou,* M. Ronnier Luo, Andre ´ e Woodcock, Angela Wright Colour & Imaging Institute, University of Derby, Kingsway House, Kingsway, Derby, DE22 3HL, UK Received 27 June 2002; revised 21 August 2003; accepted 27 August 2003 Abstract: This article classifies colour emotions for single colours and develops colour-science-based colour emotion models. In a psychophysical experiment, 31 observers, in- cluding 14 British and 17 Chinese subjects assessed 20 colours on 10 colour-emotion scales: warm– cool, heavy– light, modern– classical, clean– dirty, active–passive, hard– soft, tense–relaxed, fresh–stale, masculine–feminine, and like– dislike. Experimental results show no significant dif- ference between male and female data, whereas different results were found between British and Chinese observers for the tense–relaxed and like– dislike scales. The factor analysis identified three colour-emotion factors: colour ac- tivity, colour weight, and colour heat. The three factors agreed well with those found by Kobayashi and Sato et al. Four colour-emotion models were developed, including warm– cool, heavy–light, active–passive, and hard–soft. These models were compared with those developed by Sato et al. and Xin and Cheng. The results show that for each colour emotion the models of the three studies agreed with each other, suggesting that the four colour emotions are culture-independent across countries. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 29, 232–240, 2004; Published online in Wiley Inter- Science (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20010 Key words: colour emotion; colour meaning; colour emo- tion space; cross-cultural study; colour psychology INTRODUCTION Colours play an important role for customers in making decisions on what they like and dislike. They evoke various emotional feelings such as excitement, energy, and calm- ness. These feelings, evoked by either colours or colour combinations, are called colour emotions. In this series of studies, the overall goal is to clarify the relationship between colour emotion and colour preference. To determine this, a number of colour emotions were clas- sified by the method of factor analysis. The results were used to derive colour preference models on the basis of colour-appearance attributes, such as hue, lightness, and chroma. The first part of this series of studies focuses on colour emotions for single colours, as stated in the present article. Studies on colour-combination emotions and colour preference are presented in Parts II and III, respectively. Early studies on single-colour emotions were typically concerned with whether a large number of colour-emotion scales can be reduced into a smaller number of categories, or factors, by using the method of semantic differential introduced by Osgood et al. 1 and the factor analysis first devised by Spearman. 2 For instance, Wright and Rainwater 3 categorized 48 co- lour-emotion scales into six factors: happiness, showiness, forcefulness, warmth, elegance, and calmness. They re- vealed connections between these factors and the three colour-appearance attributes, hue, lightness, and chroma. They suggested that the influence of lightness and chroma on colour emotions was greater than that of hue. Hogg 4 used the principal component analysis to classify 12 colour-emotion scales and identified four factors: impact, usualness, evaluation, and warmth. The results showed that the factor “evaluation” was closely associated with only one scale, pleasant– unpleasant. He found that the factors impact and “warmth” were related to chroma and hue, respectively, whereas the other factors had more complex relationships with the three colour-appearance attributes. In a study of colour emotions for simulated interior spaces, Hogg et al. 5 identified five factors, including dyna- mism, spatial quality, emotional tone, complexity, and eval- *Correspondence to: Li-Chen Ou (e-mail: L.C.Ou@Derby.ac.uk) © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 232 COLOR research and application