The Attempt of Quantitative Expression for Colour Emotion

--- Influence of Assessment Method ---

Abstract

In order to investigate the influence of visual assessment method and to derive more practical colour emotion formulae, we newly carried out a visual assessment experiment with seven point method. Twelve colour emotions discussed in this study are the same to those in previous studies, i.e., “Warm-Cool”, “Light-Dark”, “Deep-Pale”, “Heavy-Light”, “Vivid-Sombre”, “Gaudy-Plain”, “Striking-Subdued”, “Dynamic-Passive”, “Distinct-Vague”, “Transparent-Turbid”, “Soft-Hard” and “Strong-Weak”. We categorised the twelve colour emotions into three groups through the relationship to attributes of colour system, and investigated the differences between visual results assessed by the two methods. The characteristics of the visual results by seven point method are roughly similar to those by two point method. With the comparison between visual results by seven and two point methods, we found some differences in the correlations of the twelve colour emotions. The correlation between visual results of colour emotions, which are contributed by lightness and colour depth, is high. But, the correlation between visual results of colour emotions, which are contributed by hue and chroma, is not so high. We also tried to derive colour emotion formulae corresponding to the visual results assessed by seven point method. We found out that all of the colour emotions can numerically be expressed with the ellipsoid-type formula. The formulae can more practically assess the magnitude of each colour emotion. This suggests it is possible to express the magnitude various human colour emotions as a distance in a colour space.