Exploring the Role of Color in Dining Experience: Preference and Relationship between Tableware Color and Dining Scenes in Japanese Young Females

Abstract

Currently little is known about how the color of non-edible items such as tableware affect people's perception of food, emotional responses and mood in dining activities. The emotional responses and mood during dining activities are considered more easily affected by colors. In this study, we conducted an experiment to understand Japanese female participants' preference and association about 8 different colors. We also designed 6 different illustration indicating typical dining situations to evaluate the perception of dining activities and color preference in each dining situations. Analysis of variance and correlation analysis were carried out to detect the significant differences between preference of colors and the relationship between color selection and adjective words. The results showed the tendency of light color being preferred to dark color, and explained that different dining situations evoked different mood and interpretation, which might lead to different choice of colors for tableware.