Element contents
Metaphor, Metonymy, the Body and the Environment
An Exploration of the Factors That Shape Emotion-Colour Associations and Their Variation across Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2023
Summary
By exploring the associations that people make between emotions and colours, looking at how they vary across languages, and exploring the explanations that people provide for the associations that they make, this Element provides insight into the ways in which humans express emotions through colour, and the reasons why they do so. Metaphoric (and metonymic) language and thought play a key role on several levels in the formation of emotion–colour associations, interacting with physical, environmental and social factors. A strong metaphorical connection between the valence of the emotion and the lightness of the colours with which it is associated, and between the intensity of an emotion and the saturation level of the colours with which it is associated is found. However, the strength of this association varies according to the linguistic background of the speaker, and the gender in which the emotion is presented.
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009042468Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 20 July 2023
References
Aslam, M. M. (2006). Are you selling the right colour? A cross‐cultural review of colour as a marketing cue. Journal of Marketing Communications, 12(1), 15–30.Google Scholar
Athanasopoulos, P., & Casaponsa, A. (2020). The Whorfian brain: Neuroscientific approaches to linguistic relativity. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 37(5–6), 393–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barchard, K. A., Grob, K. E., & Roe, M. J. (2017). Is sadness blue? The problem of using figurative language for emotions on psychological tests. Behavior Research Methods, 49(2), 443–56.Google Scholar
Barnden, J. A., Glasbey, S. R., Lee, M. G., & Wallington, A. M. (2003). Domain-transcending mappings in a system for metaphorical reasoning. In Conference companion to the 10th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 57–61). Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Barrett, L. F. (2017a). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Barrett, L. F. (2017b). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bolognesi, M. (2020). Where words get their meaning: Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language (vol. 23). John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boroditsky, L. & Schmidt, L. A. (2000). Sex, syntax, and semantics. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 22. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jt9w8zf.Google Scholar
Cannon, W. B. (1927). The James–Lange theory of emotions: A critical examination and an alternative theory. The American Journal of Psychology, 39(1/4), 106–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1415404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, J., Kacinik, N. A., Chen, Y., & Wu, N. (2016). Metaphorical color representations of emotional concepts in English and Chinese speakers. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Clarke, T., & Costall, A. (2008). The emotional connotations of color: A qualitative investigation. Color Research & Application, 33(5), 406–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/col.20435.Google Scholar
Colston, H. L., & Gibbs, R. W. (2021). Figurative language communicates directly because it precisely demonstrates what we mean. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 75(2), 228–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cubelli, R., Paolieri, D., Lotto, L., & Job, R. (2011). The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(2), 449–60.Google ScholarPubMed
Deabler, H. L. (1957). Colors and mood-tones. Journal of Applied Psychology, 41(5), 279–83.Google Scholar
Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. (1991). Explaining sex differences in social behavior: A meta-analytic perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(3), 306–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167291173011.Google Scholar
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fadzil, M. I., Omar, M. W., & Murad, M. H. (2011). The power of color on packaging. In IEEE (Ed.), 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering (pp. 761–4). IEEE.Google Scholar
Fetterman, A. K., Robinson, M. D., & Meier, B. P. (2012). Anger as ‘seeing red’: Evidence for a perceptual association. Cognition & Emotion, 26(8), 1445–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Forceville, C. J., & Renckens, T. (2013). The good is light and bad is dark metaphor in feature films. Metaphor and the Social World, 3(2), 160–79.Google Scholar
Fraser, T., & Banks, A. (2004). Designer’s color manual: The complete guide to color theory and application. Chronicle Books.Google Scholar
Fugate, J. M. B., & Franco, C. L. (2019). What color is your anger? Assessing color-emotion pairings in English speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, article 206.Google Scholar
Gibbs Jr, R. W. (1993). Why idioms are not dead metaphors. In Cacciari, C. & Tabossi, P. (Eds.), Idioms: Processing, Structure, and Interpretation (pp. 57–77). Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gilbert, A. N., Martin, R., & Kemp, S. E. (1996). Cross-modal correspondence between vision and olfaction: The color of smells. The American Journal of Psychology, 109, 335–51.Google Scholar
Goossens, L. (1990). Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics, 1(3), 323–42.Google Scholar
Gorn, G. J., Chattopadhyay, A., Yi, T., & Dahl, D. W. (1997). Effects of color as an executional cue in advertising: They’re in the shade. Management Science, 43(10), 1387–400.Google Scholar
Grady, J. (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes. Doctoral disseration, University of California. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3g9427m2.Google Scholar
Grillon, C., Pellowski, M., Merikangas, K. R., & Davis, M. (1997). Darkness facilitates the acoustic startle reflex in humans. Biological Psychiatry, 42(6), 453–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3223(96)00466-0.Google Scholar
Hanada, M. (2018). Correspondence analysis of color–emotion associations. Color Research & Application, 43(2), 224–37.Google Scholar
Heelas, P. (1996). The emotions: social, cultural and biological dimensions. In Harre, R. & Parrot, G. (Eds.), The emotions: Social, cultural and biological dimensions (pp. 171–99). Sage.Google Scholar
Jonauskaite, D., Abdel-Khalek, A. M., Abu-Akel, A., et al. (2019a). The sun is no fun without rain: Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 66, article 101350.Google Scholar
Jonauskaite, D., Wicker, J., Mohr, C., et al. (2019b). A machine learning approach to quantify the specificity of colour–emotion associations and their cultural differences. Royal Society Open Science, 6(9), article 190741.Google Scholar
Jonauskaite, D., Abu-Akel, A., Dael, N., et al. (2020). Universal patterns in color–emotion associations are further shaped by linguistic and geographic proximity. Psychological Science, 31(10), 1245–60.Google Scholar
Kaya, N., & Epps, H. H. (2004). Relationship between color and emotion: A study of college students. College Student Journal, 38(3), 396–405.Google Scholar
Kehoe, E. G., Toomey, J. M., Balsters, J. H., & Bokde, A. L. (2012). Personality modulates the effects of emotional arousal and valence on brain activation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(7), 858–70.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and body in human feeling. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2008). Metaphor and emotion. In Gibbs, R. W. Jr. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought (pp. 380–96). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krippendorff, K. (2011). Computing Krippendorff’s alpha-reliability. University of Pennsylvania departmental papers.Google Scholar
Kuhbandner, C., & Pekrun, R. (2013). Joint effects of emotion and color on memory. Emotion, 13(3), 375–9.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Ortony, A. (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.; pp. 202–51). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lang, P. J., Greenwald, M. K., Bradley, M. M., & Hamm, A. O. (1993). Looking at pictures: Affective, facial, visceral, and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30(3), 261–73.Google Scholar
Littlemore, J. (2015). Metonymy: Hidden shortcuts in language, thought and communication. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lynn, R., & Martin, T. (1995). National differences for thirty-seven nations in extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and economic, demographic and other correlates. Personality and Individual Differences, 19(3), 403–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(95)00054-A.Google Scholar
Macnamara, J. (2019). Linguistic relativity revisited. In Cooper, R. L. & Spolsky, B. J. (Eds.), The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought (pp. 45–60). De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Matsuki, K. (1995). Metaphors of anger in Japanese. Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, 82, 137–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meier, B. P., & Robinson, M. D. (2005). The metaphorical representation of affect. Metaphor and Symbol, 20(4), 239–57. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms2004_1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Crawford, L. E., & Ahlvers, W. J. (2007). When ‘light’ and ‘dark’ thoughts become light and dark responses: Affect biases brightness judgments. Emotion, 7(2), 366–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mikolajczuk, A. (1998). The metonymic and metaphorical conceptualisation of anger in Polish. Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression, 10, 153–91.Google Scholar
Montefinese, M., Ambrosini, E., Fairfield, B., & Mammarella, N. (2014). The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 887–903. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0405-3Google Scholar
Moon, R. (1998). Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach. Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Nayak, N. P., & Gibbs, R. W. (1990). Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119(3), 315–30.Google Scholar
Niemeier, S., & Dirven, R. (2000). Evidence for linguistic relativity (Vol. 198). John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ortony, A., & Fainsilber, L. (1987). The role of metaphors in descriptions of emotions. Presented at the Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing 3.Google Scholar
Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, S. E., Schloss, K. B., Xu, Z., & Prado-León, L. R. (2013). Music–color associations are mediated by emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(22), 8836–41.Google Scholar
Pravossoudovitch, K., Cury, F., Young, S. G., & Elliot, A. J. (2014). Is red the colour of danger? Testing an implicit red–danger association. Ergonomics, 57(4), 503–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pütz, M., & Verspoor, M. (2000). Explorations in linguistic relativity (vol. 199). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Reisenzein, R. (1994). Pleasure-arousal theory and the intensity of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 525–39.Google Scholar
Ruiz De Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J. & Díez Velasco, O. I. (2002). Patterns of conceptual interaction. In Pörings, Ralf & Dirven, René (Eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast (pp. 489–532). De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J. & Galera Masegosa, A. (2011). Going beyond metaphtonymy: Metaphoric and metonymic complexes in phrasal verb interpretation. Language Value, 3, 1–29.Google Scholar
Russell, J. A., & Barrett, L. F. (1999). Core affect, prototypical emotional episodes, and other things called emotion: Dissecting the elephant. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(5), 805–19.Google Scholar
Sandford, J. (2021). The sense of color: A cognitive linguistic analysis of color words. Aguaplano.Google Scholar
Sandford, J. L. (2014). Turn a colour with emotion: A linguistic construction of colour in English. JAIC-Journal of the International Colour Association, 13, 67–83.Google Scholar
Sato, S., & Athanasopoulos, P. (2018). Grammatical gender affects gender perception: Evidence for the structural-feedback hypothesis. Cognition, 176, 220–31.Google Scholar
Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69(5), 379–99.Google Scholar
Schifferstein, H. N., & Tanudjaja, I. (2004). Visualising fragrances through colours: The mediating role of emotions. Perception, 33(10), 1249–66.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1996). From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking‘. In Gumperz, S. and Levinson, S. (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Slobodenyuk, N., Jraissati, Y., Kanso, A., Ghanem, L., & Elhajj, I. (2015). Cross-Modal Associations between Color and Haptics. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 77(4), 1379–95. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-015-0837-1Google Scholar
Soriano, C., & Valenzuela, J. (2009). Emotion and colour across languages: Implicit associations in Spanish colour terms. Social Science Information, 48(3), 421–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018409106199.Google Scholar
Spence, C., Levitan, C., Shankar, M., & Zampini, M. (2010). Does food color influence taste and flavor perception in humans? Chemosensory Perception, 3(1), 68–84.Google Scholar
Sutton, T. M., & Altarriba, J. (2016). Color associations to emotion and emotion-laden words: A collection of norms for stimulus construction and selection. Behavior Research Methods, 48(2), 686–728.Google Scholar
Waggoner, J. E., & Palermo, D. S. (1989). Betty is a bouncing bubble: Children’s comprehension of emotion-descriptive metaphors. Developmental Psychology, 25(1), 152–63.Google Scholar
Wahl, S., Engelhardt, M., Schaupp, P., Lappe, C., & Ivanov, I. V. (2019). The inner clock: Blue light sets the human rhythm. Journal of Biophotonics, 12(12), article e201900102. https://doi.org/10.1002/jbio.201900102.Google Scholar
Walters, J., Apter, M. J., & Svebak, S. (1982). Color preference, arousal, and the theory of psychological reversals. Motivation and Emotion, 6(3), 193–215.Google Scholar
Wang, T., Shu, S., & Mo, L. (2014). Blue or red? The effects of colour on the emotions of C hinese people. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 17(2), 152–8.Google Scholar
Warriner, A. B., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191–207. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wee, Y. C., & Gopalakrishnakone, P. (1990). A colour guide to dangerous plants. NUS Press.Google Scholar
Wexner, L. B. (1954). The degree to which colors (hues) are associated with mood-tones. Journal of Applied Psychology, 38(6), 432–5.Google Scholar
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780–5.Google Scholar