Effects of Lighting Color on Promoting Emotional States

Abstract

It is known that the colors in our surroundings affect our emotions in the real-world environment. Previous studies investigated the relationship between environmental colors and emotions. In this study, we first discuss a psychophysical experiment showing that even if the surrounding colors are equivalent, the emotions recalled might differ depending on the situation. We then set up an environment in which a specific emotional state was triggered by conversation and investigated the lighting conditions that promote that emotional state through psychophysical experiments. We found no significant effect on positive emotional states such as happiness under a single uniform lighting condition generated by a recall color. In contrast, negative emotional states such as sadness were significantly promoted under the single uniform lighting condition. An additional experiment suggests that positive emotional states could be promoted by illumination with a spatial combination of a color recalled from the emotion and its opponent color.