Academic Critique: Is Color Significance a Learned Behavior?

Colors unknowingly greatly impact our day-to-day lives, but color interpretation can differ worldwide. For instance, purple signifies wealth and power in Japan, whereas in Thailand and Brazil, purple signifies mourning, commonly worn by widows. The color-to-emotion association is suggested to be a learned behavior. In "Colour-emotion associations in individuals with red-green color blindness," this study aimed to test the importance of conceptual knowledge and the immediate perceptual experience of color concerning color-emotion association. The paper discussed a recent study that showed high similarity in how colors and emotions were associated across participants from different cultures. One mechanism proposed to explain why this occurs is the concept of conceptual knowledge, where the association of color and emotion is accessed and transmitted through communication rather than color perception itself, invoking emotional experiences. The researchers tested this hypothesis by comparing color-emotion associations in men with and without color vision deficiencies. They used color patches and the Geneva Emotion Wheel to measure emotion associations with colors and statistically analyzed the data. Overall, their results showed high degrees of similarities in color-emotion associations between individuals with and without color blindness. In addition, they found that colorblind individuals showed the lowest patch-term similarities for purple and green and had more intense emotion associated with red, orange, yellow, pink, black, and white when the colors were presented as terms rather than patches. 

This paper relates to the module, specifically the color section because the module highlights topics like the importance of color in corporate logos and the psychological repercussions of having specific colors for wallpapers. The author provides possible reasons why we experience our emotions when seeing particular colors. In addition, the paper highlighted some intriguing theories relating to vision and human color preference. For example, according to the cone-opponent theory, human color preferences are influenced by the information our cones send to retinal ganglion cells that excite or inhibit corresponding cells depending on certain wavelengths of light. 

Language and communication significantly affect how we perceive and process certain entities. This paper is important because if immediate perceptual experiences are not necessary for color-emotion associations during adulthood, research on color-emotion associations might not align with applied domains. For instance, the concept of color therapy, or chromotherapy, assumes that perception of color can impact one's emotional state. This paper also emphasizes the importance of perceptual experiences in their relevance to color preferences rather than to color emotion associations, which future experiments should account for more when explaining color preferences. Finally, this paper is beneficial because it shows humans' social impacts on the things we perceive and how we process them. 

colorblindcolorblindSome limitations they discussed in the paper were the use of focal colors and basic color terms, which are overused and overlearned. They proposed that using color patches that are difficult to name or uncommon color terms, like lavender or mauve, would be the next step to further this research, revealing more differences between colorblind and non-color-blind individuals. Another limitation they encountered was using the Color Blind Index to account for the individuals' diversity and varying strengths of color blindness. They found that the Colour Blindness Index could not accurately predict color-emotion associations, which meant the degree of color blindness within their colorblind group did not affect color-emotion associations. Lastly, like many other studies, greater sample size and diversity would have given a more in-depth look into these associations. While the study did include men with partial and complete color vision deficiencies, which provided diversity for the colorblind population, they only used European men for this experiment. For future experiments, it could be beneficial to include women with and without color vision deficiencies since women are scientifically known to process emotions differently than men. Including individuals with visual impairments would also adequately address whether immediate perceptual experiences influence color-emotion associations since these individuals perceive colors differently from both colorblind and non-colorblind individuals.

This paper was extremely well-written, easy to read, and intriguing! The most engaging parts of the paper were the Discussion and Theoretical and Practical Implications sections. The discussion section nicely summarized the results section by providing explanations of how the experiment was performed and justifying why they did them. The Theoretical and Practical Implications section also gave a fascinating insight into other studies and papers that support their claim, along with sources against it. In addition, the author did a great job making unknown terminology digestible and easy to understand, which played a huge role in engagement. In conclusion, this paper delivered a powerful study evaluating whether conceptual mechanisms, such as language and knowledge, are adequate for consistent color-emotion associations to be observed or if a direct color experience is necessary.