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Colour Psychology > How Does It Work?
Many people think that colour is just a matter of how things look
and it is often dismissed as being purely cosmetic. However, the truth
is that colour is light - the source of life itself; there is nowhere
that colour does not exist and our instinctive, unconscious response
to it is a vital element in our survival.
It is Nature's own powerful signalling system. Scientifically,
it is the first thing we register when we are assessing anything:
a very simple and obvious example of that is our reaction to a fly
in our home: if it is black, we will probably find it a minor irritation,
but if it has yellow stripes our reaction will be different - most
of us will recoil. The same instinct tells us when food is unsafe
to eat and throughout the animal kingdom colour is widely used to
signal sexual availability.
On a wider level, the colours of our environment affect our behaviour
and mood. When yellow daffodils, bluebells and colourful crocuses
appear, we immediately begin to feel livelier; when grey skies and
rain or snow surround us we instinctively draw in and tend to hibernate.
In today's sophisticated world it is easy to underestimate the
power of primitive instincts, as they are largely unconscious. Today
we might be contemplating a packet of corn flakes or a new cold
cure, rather than a primitive meal or a curative herb, but exactly
the same instincts come powerfully into play. The colours of the
interior environment wherein we live or work affects us in just
the same way as those in the natural world always did. The colours
that people wear still send out clear signals that we can all read
accurately.
Science has always recognised the link between colour and mood/behaviour
and there is a large body of scientific research into it. However,
no one has written a monograph on the subject for over thirty years
and one reason for this might be that results are so often inconclusive.
It is not normally part of a psychologist's remit to study the finer
points of colour harmony so colours are defined as, for example,
"blue and orange" or "red and green" without
much consideration of the subtleties of shade and tone. Angela Wright
studied both unconscious thought processes and the dynamics of colour
harmony in her exploration of colour psychology. Click here
to read how the Colour Affects System relates to traditional colour
theories.
Everyone agrees that response to colour is subjective and assumes
that it must therefore be unpredictable.
Not so.
Response is subjective but, when the study of colour harmony is
combined with the science of psychology, reactions can be predicted
with startling accuracy. There is no such thing as a universally
attractive colour. Red, for example, might be your favourite colour
but another person might hate it. You see it as exciting, friendly
and stimulating, he sees it as aggressive and demanding. Blue might
be perceived as calm and soothing - or as cold and unfriendly. It
is the combination of colours that triggers the response.
The key factor that Angela Wright recognised in studying colour
psychology was that, equally, there are no wrong colours; we do
not respond to just one colour, but to colours in combination. You
could have a grey sky on a summer day, but our reaction to that
grey with the vivid colours of the summer landscape would be different
from the combination of a grey sky with snow white. Even the winter
landscape contains many colours.
In many ways, colour and music work the same way. As jazz pianist
Thelonius Monk observed: "There are no wrong notes".
It is important to understand that there is a great difference
between colour psychology and colour symbolism. Historically, what
is often described as colour psychology is actually colour symbolism
- the conscious associations that we are conditioned to make. For
example, cultural responses to colour derive from a variety of causes:
green is the sacred colour throughout Islam, being the colour of
the Prophet's robe; in England it is considered unlucky, probably
because of its association with decay and disease; in Ireland it
is considered lucky, perhaps because when the world about us contains
plenty of green this indicates the presence of water and therefore
little danger of famine. There are many examples of colour symbolism:
purple is associated with royalty for the simple reason that, until
relatively recently, it was an extremely expensive dye and only
royalty could afford it; red is the colour of blood and has associations
with war.
These associations often coincide with colour psychology (red actually
can trigger aggression) but they are by no means the same thing.
Click here for the psychological properties
of the main colours.
The key to successfully applied colour psychology is the recognition
of tonal families of colour and how they relate to personality types.
All the millions of shades, tones and tints can be classified into
just four tonal families and great minds throughout history have
also repeatedly classified humanity into four types, from Galen
in early Rome (predominant bodily fluids defining a person as Choleric,
Melancholic, Sanguine or Phlegmatic) to Jung in the twentieth century
(determining function being predominantly Thought, Feeling, Intuition
or Sensation). Click here for a description
of the four personality types and the colour family that relates
to each of them.
When Angela Wright made the connection between these two, she was
able to create, for the first time, a colour psychology system that
works. It enables response to be accurately predicted; it enables
creation of colour combinations that will be universally attractive.
She has developed it for use in a variety of applications. Click
here for further information on the Colour
Affects System.
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