Structural Equation Modeling for Relationships between Color Attributes and Dimensions of Emotional State

Abstract

A topic of interest in color research is the exploration of emotional responses to color stimuli, referred to as color emotion. Although some subjects in color research have been well documented, many aspects of the evaluative and descriptive dimensions of color emotion have not been sufficiently studied. In this paper, we measured the emotional states elicited by single color stimuli with the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale, which consists of valence, arousal, and dominance dimensions of emotional state. To clarify the relationships between color appearance and emotional state (L*, C* and h in CIELCh), we conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) on the empirical data provided by Suk & Irtel (2010) and those provided by the present study. The resulting models for each data set illustrated that emotional states are influenced by color attributes; valence is principally influenced by lightness (L*) and chroma (C*), and arousal is influenced principally by chroma.