Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Psychologica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy The universal and automatic association between brightness and positivity ☆ Eva Specker a, ⁎ , Helmut Leder a , Raphael Rosenberg b , Lisa Mira Hegelmaier a , Hanna Brinkmann b , Jan Mikuni c , Hideaki Kawabata c a Faculty of Psychology, Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods, University of Vienna, Austria b Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, Department of Art History, University of Vienna, Austria c Faculty of Psychology, Keio University, Japan ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Color Color association Brightness Positivity Cross-cultural psychology ABSTRACT The present study investigates the hypothesis that brightness of colors is associated with positivity, postulating that this is an automatic and universal eﬀect. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was used in all studies. Study 1 used color patches varying on brightness, Study 2 used achromatic stimuli to eliminate the potential confounding eﬀects of hue and saturation. Study 3 replicated Study 2 in a diﬀerent cultural context (Japan vs. Austria), both studies also included a measure of explicit association. All studies conﬁrmed the hypothesis that brightness is associated with positivity, at a signiﬁcance level of p < .001 and Cohen's D varying from 0.90 to 3.99. Study 1–3 provided support for the notion that this is an automatic eﬀect. Additionally, Study 2 and Study 3 showed that people also have an explicit association of brightness with positivity. However, as expected, our results also show that the implicit association was stronger than the explicit association. Study 3 shows clear support for the universality of our eﬀects. In sum, our results support the idea that brightness is associated with positivity and that these associations are automatic and universal. 1. Introduction The notion that brightness is positive and darkness is negative can be traced back to mythical time. The famous story of Theseus and the Minotaur features the agreement between Theseus and his father, Aegeus, to hoist a white ﬂag for success (defeat of the Minotaur) and a black one for defeat. As the art historian Gombrich (1963) mentions: “Surely it was no accident that black rather than white was the sign agreed upon for failure. Black seems to us a more ‘natural’ sign for grief, and white for a ‘brighter’ mood: and even though we know that cultural conventions also play their part (and that black is not everywhere the color of mourning), the correlation makes sense in terms of expres- siveness (p.61).” Historically there has been great interest in studying the aesthetic eﬀects of diﬀerent colors in literature on art as well as in psychology (Bullough, 1907; De Camp, 1917; Fechner, 1876). Artists and art his- torians often use the term “eﬀect” or “aesthetic eﬀect” (e.g. Gombrich, 1963; Itten, 1961; Kandinsky, 1911; Schwitters, 1918), whereas in psychology it is more common to speak of associations. Basically both terms refer to the same experience. Kandinsky (1946) for example, speciﬁed diﬀerent associations for the color black: “Black is something extinguished like a burned pyre, something immobile, corpse-like, which has no connection with any occurrences, and accessible to all things. It is like the silence of the body after death, the end of life (p.68).” Even though early psychological studies (e.g., Alexander & Shansky, 1976; Bullough, 1907; De Camp, 1917; Mogensen & English, 1926; Monroe, 1925; Pinkerton & Humphrey, 1974; Tinker, 1938) show a great interest in color associations, the methodological quality is poor (Gelineau, 1981; Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). More recent work has neglected associations somewhat and has a greater focus on color preferences (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007; Osborne et al., 2016; Palmer & Schloss, 2010; Wei, Houser, Allen, & Beers, 2014) despite this there have been studies conducted that looked at associations (Adams & Osgood, 1973; Albertazzi et al., 2013; Chen, Tanaka, & Watanabe, 2015; Dael, Perseguers, Marchand, Antonietti, & Mohr, 2016; Lazreg & Mullet, 2001; Saito, 1996). Most color conceptualizations deﬁne color as having 3 features: hue (i.e. wavelength), saturation (i.e. vividness, with lower saturation containing more grey), and brightness (i.e. black-to-white quality). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.04.007 Received 9 May 2017; Received in revised form 8 March 2018; Accepted 16 April 2018 ☆ The writing of this paper was supported by a grant to RR and HL by Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (WWTF: Project number: CS15-036). We wish to acknowledge Simon Schreibelmayr for his help with data collection and programming. ⁎ Corresponding author at: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, A-1010 Vienna, Austria. E-mail address: eva.specker@univie.ac.at (E. Specker). Acta Psychologica 186 (2018) 47–53 0001-6918/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T