Color psychology
Color psychology is the study of hues as a cognitive influence on emotions and ultimately human behavior. Color does not affect each person the same. Age, gender, and culture are all factors that affect how people perceive a color. Even something as unique as a sensory connotation between a person and past experience can have an impact.
The retina in your eye is covered with millions of light-sensitive cells. When you look at a color, these little light receptors, some shaped as rods and others as cones, within your eye translate the light reflected from the object in the form of color by sending nerve impulses to the part of your brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then sends signals to the pituitary gland, which in return transmits signals onto the thyroid gland.
The latter then prompts the release of hormones. This is the reason why we have specific emotions that relate to a specific color. We'll dig deeper into color and emotions a bit later. Let's first look at the color theory and how colors are created through the light:
Each color in the color spectrum represents a different light wavelength, and every object absorbs different wavelengths of color depending on the object. In the preceding figure, the red watermelon absorbs all the light wavelengths except the wavelength, which is the color of the object, which is in this case is red. When we say the watermelon absorbs the colors, we mean they disappear and are not visible to the eye. In another example, we can take a pair of purple sunglasses. The sunglasses will absorb all the light wavelengths, making them invisible to the eye and just reflects the light wavelength that represents the color purple to the eye. If an object does not absorb any of the light wavelengths, but instead reflects them all, the object will appear white. If an object absorbs all the light wavelengths it will make all the colors vanish and appear black.
A broad guideline for which light wavelengths represent which colors is as follows:
- Longer light wavelengths are usually reds, oranges, and yellows
- Short light wavelengths are for blues and greens
Within the human eye, two-thirds of the cone-shaped reflectors process the longer light wavelengths, while the other third process the shorter wavelengths. Thus, the human eye can perceive a wider spectrum of warmer colors than cooler colors. The color theory of light is slightly different than basic color theory and there's no need to know the science behind this theory in depth. It will be helpful to understand how color and light work as the color you'll be working with is on a device screen, which is in fact light.
A Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, was a highly influential individual who worked in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, to name just a few. He pursued an intense study of colors' properties and meanings across cultures to see if there's a potential use of color in art as a tool in psychotherapy, which eventually transformed into the modern field of color psychology.
The six basic principles of color psychology according to Jung are as follows:
- Color has a specific meaning: A color can have a positive meaning to one person and a negative meaning to another person.
- The meaning of a color is learned in either of the two following ways:
- Contextually learned: A person can learn that the purple cup with tea doesn't taste sweet and thus associate any purple cup, despite what's in it, as not appealing
- Biologically learned: As a person born into a Chinese family, it's natural to associate white with death and mourning as used in the Chinese culture
- A person automatically perceives and evaluates a color: It's natural to look at a color and evaluate it without a conscious evaluation process. For example, if a person sees red liquid on their skin they will not consciously go through a process of deciding what it might be, automatically the color will be evaluated as perceived as blood. It's a subconscious action.
- The evaluation process causes behavior: A specific behavior is motivated by the color perceived by the person. If the person sees a red light and perceived it as a danger, the person will take action to avoid the situation.
- Color influences automatically: A person's decisions are automatically influenced by color. Color can sway a person to buy one product over another.
- Color meaning lives in context: A color can have different meanings based on where the color is perceived. This can be in different countries, cultures, textures, food, or devices.
As you can see, color is not just color. It is a very powerful and influential tool when designing the UI of a website. We'll discuss the different aspects of color in more detail in the following sections.