Can orange colour facilitate the processing of happiness? An exploration study on happiness metaphor

Abstract

Colour is a ubiquitous perceptual stimulus, and theoretical models of colour and psychological functioning posit that colour plays a key role in influencing the behaviour and mental function of a person. One investigation and two experiments investigated the colour metaphor representation of happiness concepts and the mapping mode of the colour metaphor of happiness concepts. A questionnaire was conducted to explore the relationship between colour preference and happiness. Study 2 shows that the identification of happiness words was facilitated more when words were viewed on an orange background than when viewed on a blue background. Study 3 further verifies the links of the connection between colour and happiness at the sentence level, and the orange‐happiness facilitation effect was replicated. These results document a novel influence of colour on emotion recognition processes, where an orange background may facilitate the processing of the concept of happiness and provide support for conceptual metaphor theory and colour‐in‐context theory.