Effect of Color Applied to a Character on Its Impression and Gender Difference on Its Perception

Abstract

This paper clarifies the effect of color on the impression produced by a character, as well as its perception difference between men and women. In our experiments, we selected four letters (B, H, N, O) as we consider they represent the different groups categorized by shape that they belong to. These characters were colored in black, blue, green, red, and yellow to be evaluated through 24 impression word pairs. The results showed a significant impression difference between men and women. It was also shown that the impression produced by the characters can be expressed by three factors: Elegance, Liveliness, and Potency, though the appreciated importance of each factor on character impression varies between gender. In addition, we focus on specific impression word pairs having gender differences. These are “Cheerful-Gloomy,” “Bright-Dark,” “Hard-Soft,” “Optimistic-Pessimistic,” and “Shallow-Deep.” Intensive comparison of the impressions felt by men and women suggest a different perception tendency experimented by each gender.