The Difference Between Color Emotion and Color Semantics
Semantics can sometimes be a problem, because they don’t always accurately describe what we need to say. Conversely, emotions are difficult to convey in words. For a long time, there was a school of thought surrounding what was called “color emotion.” Now that term has changed because it’s been found to be inaccurate. The emotions that colors convey are not the same thing as semantics. The relationship between color and the psychological response of the person seeing it has been studied for a long time, though, and people are always trying to come up with new and better ways to describe what they see and what they feel.
To that end, color-emotion exercises have been created that are designed to work with both semantics and emotion. These ask people to rate how they feel when they look at a particular color and give insight into what a lot of colors mean and how individuals can expect to feel when they are presented with certain colors, along with why that occurs. The study and interest behind color semantics and these kinds of tests came from the color research that started in the early 20th century, and then later from Kobayashi’s colour image scales’ in 1981. Color emotion became the standard term in 1997, but most of the research that was done under that term actually involved semantics instead and so was inconsistent with what it was really called. Some feel the terms are splitting hairs and should be left alone.
In short, color emotion deals with words like happiness, anxiety, and excitement, and color semantics is involved with term such as heavy, light, warm, cool, passive, and active. The distinction, though, is not always an easy one to make, and most people will say that color gives them a certain emotion because of the way it feels. This ties emotions and semantics together very tightly, and it looks like this will always be the way where color is concerned. For some people it has deep meaning and for others it simply provides comfort or a smile, but it generally always evokes some type of feeling. Trying to separate color emotion and color semantics is important from the standpoint of technicalities and research, but not so important to the individuals who look at a particular color and react to it in some way that makes a difference in their lives and their emotions.
