Black is always Sad: Universality of Affective Associations with Colour across 30 Countries

While affective and symbolic meanings of colour might be the making of cultural customs (e.g., white vs. red worn at weddings in Western world vs. China/Japan), little is known whether emotion associations with colour are also culture-specific, or rather universal. Considering that emotion display is largely universal and recognisable around the world (e.g., frowning to display anger), and that certain emotion display involves colour (e.g., blood flowing to an angry face), it is not unreasonable to expect that this shared experience may lead to universal colour-emotion associations. We performed a comprehensive, systematic survey on conceptual colour-affect associations in 30 countries (N = 4,598; males = 1,114; mean age = 35.63 y.), completed in individuals’ respective native languages to test these opposing predictions (https://www2.unil.ch/onlinepsylab/colour/main.php). Participants associated 12 colour terms with one, several, or none of 20 emotion concepts presented in a circular format. We computed association matrices on the likelihood of associating 12 colour terms with each of the 20 emotions for each country. Colour-emotion associations of individual countries were relatively close to the colour-emotion associations of the “global” matrix (average likelihood); similarity was highest for Spain (94.1%) followed by 14 additional countries with a similarity level of ≥ 85%. Subsequent cluster analyses indicated two clusters: i) 27 countries close to the “global” matrix and ii) three countries with lower similarity levels to the “global” matrix. Our results suggest there is a high inter-country agreement of the affective connotations of colour terms. Potential explanations of these universal patterns will be discussed.