Department of Psychology, Lancaster University.
Department of Psychology, University of Winchester.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2020 Jul;149(7):1311-1332. doi: 10.1037/xge0000703. Epub 2019 Nov 25.
Associations with colors are a rich source of meaning, and there has been considerable interest in understanding the capacity of color to shape our functioning and behavior as a result of color associations. However, abstract conceptual color associations have not been comprehensively investigated, and many of the effects of color on psychological functioning reported in the literature are therefore reliant on ad hoc rationalizations of conceptual associations with color (e.g., blue = openness) to explain effects. In the present work we conduct a systematic, cross-cultural, mapping of conceptual color associations using the full set of hues from the World Color Survey (WCS). In Experiments 1a and 1b we explored the conceptual associations that English monolingual, Chinese bilingual, and Chinese monolingual speaking adults have with each of the 11 Basic English Color Terms (black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, gray). In Experiment 2 we determined which specific physical WCS colors are associated with which concepts in these three language groups. The findings reveal conceptual color associations that appear to be universal across all cultures (e.g., white - ; blue - ; green - ; purple - ; pink - "" ) as well as culture specific (e.g., red and orange - in Chinese; red - in English). Importantly, the findings provide a crucial constraint on, and resource for, future work that seeks to understand the effect of color on cognition and behavior, enabling stronger a priori predictions about universal as well as culturally relative effects of conceptual color associations on cognition and behavior to be systematically tested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
颜色联想是意义的丰富来源，人们对理解颜色如何通过颜色联想来影响我们的功能和行为产生了浓厚的兴趣。然而，抽象的概念性颜色联想尚未得到全面研究，因此，文献中报告的许多颜色对心理功能的影响都依赖于对颜色概念联想（例如，蓝色=开放性）的临时合理化来解释这些影响。在本工作中，我们使用来自世界颜色调查（WCS）的全色调集，对概念性颜色联想进行了系统的、跨文化的映射。在实验 1a 和 1b 中，我们探索了英语单语者、汉语双语者和汉语单语者对 11 个基本英语颜色术语（黑、白、红、黄、绿、蓝、棕、紫、粉、橙、灰）的每个颜色的概念联想。在实验 2 中，我们确定了这三个语言群体中哪些特定的 WCS 颜色与哪些概念相关联。研究结果揭示了一些跨文化普遍存在的概念性颜色联想（例如，白色-；蓝色-；绿色-；紫色-；粉色-“纯洁”）以及文化特定的联想（例如，红色和橙色-在中国；红色-在英语中）。重要的是，这些发现为理解颜色对认知和行为的影响的未来工作提供了重要的限制和资源，使我们能够更系统地测试关于概念性颜色联想对认知和行为的普遍影响以及文化相对影响的先验预测。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
