Department of Psychology & Logopedics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2019 Apr 17;14(4):e0215610. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215610. eCollection 2019.
The color red seems to be consistently associated with the concept of anger. Beyond semantic associations, it has been suggested that the color red enhances our ability to perceive anger in faces. However, previous studies often lack proper color control or the results are confounded by the presence of several emotions. Moreover, the magnitude of the (potential) effect of red has not been quantified. To address these caveats, we quantified the effect of facial color and background color on anger with psychometric functions measured with the method-of-constant-stimuli while facial hue or surround hue was varied in CIELAB color space. Stimulus sequences were generated by morphing between neutral and angry faces. For the facial color, the average chromaticity of the faces was shifted by ΔE 12/20 in red, yellow, green and blue directions. For the background color, the hue was either neutral or saturated red, green or blue. Both facial redness and surround redness enhanced perceived anger slightly, by 3-4 morph-%. Other colors did not affect perceived anger. As the magnitude of the enhancement is generally small and the effect is robust only in a small subset of the participants, we question the practical significance of red in anger recognition.
红色似乎总是与愤怒的概念联系在一起。除了语义上的联系，还有人认为红色增强了我们识别面部愤怒的能力。然而，之前的研究往往缺乏适当的颜色控制，或者结果因存在多种情绪而受到混淆。此外，红色（潜在）效果的大小尚未被量化。为了解决这些问题，我们使用恒定刺激法测量心理物理函数来量化面部颜色和背景颜色对愤怒的影响，同时在 CIELAB 颜色空间中改变面部色调或周围色调。刺激序列通过在中性和愤怒面孔之间的变形生成。对于面部颜色，将面部的平均色度沿着红、黄、绿和蓝方向偏移ΔE 12/20。对于背景颜色，色调要么是中性的，要么是饱和的红、绿或蓝。面部的红色和周围的红色都略微增强了感知到的愤怒，增加了 3-4 个变形百分比。其他颜色则不会影响感知到的愤怒。由于增强的幅度通常很小，而且这种效果只在一小部分参与者中稳健，因此我们质疑红色在愤怒识别中的实际意义。
