A study of colour emotion and colour preference. Part I: Colour emotions for single colours

Abstract This article classifies colour emotions for single colours and develops colour‐science‐based colour emotion models. In a psychophysical experiment, 31 observers, including 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 difference 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 activity, colour weight, and…