Colors and emotions: a comparison between Spanish and Mandarin

This study aims to determine if there are differences in color-emotion association between monolingual speakers of Spanish and Mandarin, also depending on how colors are presented (either verbally or visually). With this aim, we tested two groups of 25 speakers of these two languages in two different tasks using the Geneva Emotional Wheel, which encompasses 20 types of emotions. In Task 1, 13 colors were presented to participants as color terms, whereas in Task 2 the same colors were presented as color patches from the Munsell chart. Overall, differences between languages were not significant, either regarding the type of emotion, or individual dimensions of emotion (valence, arousal, or power), although significant differences were observed for specific colors. Also, Spanish speakers tended to attribute higher intensity values and higher numbers of emotion values to colors. At the same time, speakers of both languages reacted similarly to the mode of color presentation, with color terms being associated to the same emotions than color patches, but eliciting stronger reactions with respect to intensity and number of emotion values. Finally, we found less variability in color-emotion associations within the Spanish-speaking group. Overall, our study points to a mixed pattern of universality and culture-specificity regarding how colors are used for conveying emotions.