Rapport technique : 2015/01/S.GIL Colour and emotion: children also associate red with negative valence Sandrine Gil and Ludovic Le Bigot Université de Poitiers, France; CNRS (CeRCA UMR7295), France. A paraître dans / To appear in: Gil, S., & Le Bigot, L.. Colour and emotion: children also associate red with negative valence. Developmental science. Address for correspondence to the first author at: Sandrine Gil, Université de Poitiers –CNRS Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage (CeRCA) – CNRS UMR 7295 MSHS - Bâtiment A5, 5 rue Théodore Lefebvre, TSA 21103, 86073 Poitiers Cedex E-mail : [email protected] ABSTRACT The association of colour with emotion constitutes a growing field of research, as it can affect how humans process their environment. Although there has been increasing interest in the association of red with negative valence in adults, little is known about how it develops. We therefore tested the red–negative association in children for the first time. Children aged 5–10 years performed a face categorization task in the form of a card-sorting task. They had to judge whether ambiguous faces shown against three different colour backgrounds (red, grey, green) seemed to ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’. Results of logistic mixed models showed that – as previously demonstrated in adults – children across the age range provided significantly more ‘feel bad’ responses when the faces were given a red background. This finding is discussed in relation to colour–emotion association theories. Research highlights This paper deals with a growing field of research (in adults) on how color is emotionally loaded, and how colour– emotion associations influence psycho- logical functioning. This is the first time that the meaning associated with the colour red has been studied from a developmental perspective (ages 5–10 years) and with an experimental design (card-sorting task). The findings are clear: children across the age range associated red with negative valence, as previously demonstrated in adult studies. INTRODUCTION As well as having physical and aesthetic qualities, colour is charged with emotional meaning (Elliot & Maier, 2014; Goldstein, 1942; Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). Inasmuch as they constitute a source of contextual information, colour– meaning associations can dramatically modulate how humans perceive a target stimulus or event. Moreover, as these associations can vary according to context (e.g. Elliot, Maier, Moller, Friedman & Meinhardt, 2007) and culture (e.g. Jiang, Lu, Yao, Yue & Au, 2014), there is every reason to think that their genesis is influenced by people’s experiential background. For theorists, this raises the question of whether colour– meaning associations change across development. We therefore set out to examine this issue by conducting an original developmental study which, for the first time, investigated (1) whether children implicitly associate the colour red with negative meaning, as has already been demonstrated in adults, and (2) whether this association changes across development. In most developmental studies, the emotion–colour link has been investigated through drawings. The idea is that the use of particular colours by children can reflect the emotional charge of their drawings, thus providing a means of accessing an emotional state that can be difficult to verbalize. For instance, studies have used colour to infer the emotional experience of pain during hospitalization (e.g. Unrah, McGrath, Cunningham & Humphreys, 1983) and the quality of parent–child attachment (e.g. Fury, Carlson & Sroufe, 1997). The research by Burkitt and colleagues has provided the best experimentally controlled evidence that the use of colours in drawings is not arbitrary, but instead reflects emotional associations and preferences. In their studies, children were invited to colour in pictures that they had either drawn themselves (Burkitt, Barrett & Davis, 2004) or were predrawn (Burkitt, Barrett & Davis, 2003) of different subjects (e.g. a man, a tree) characterized as positive, negative or neutral. In addition, the children completed a task to assess their colour preferences. Results showed that children used their favourite colours for positive-related characters, their least favorite ones for negative-related characters, and colours with medium preference for neutral characters (see also Burkitt & Sheppard, 2014; Burkitt, Tala & Low, 2007). In the same vein, when Zentner (2001) showed nine coloured cards to 3- and 4-year-old children and asked them to pick the colour they preferred, they found that these young children preferred bright colours (i.e. pink, red, bright green, bright blue, and yellow) to dark ones (i.e. brown, dark blue, dark green, and black). Red was consistently observed to be their favourite colour, contrasting with the preference for blue in adults (e.g. Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). In addition, this author adminis- tered a colour–emotion matching task to the same children, asking them to match coloured cards with drawings of emotional faces (i.e. happy, sad, and angry faces). Results showed that happy faces were matched with bright colours, whereas sad faces were matched with dark ones, but no particular results were obtained with angry faces. In contrast to Zentner’s findings with very young children, when Karp and Karp (1988) asked 9- to 10-year-old children to associate 12 concepts with the colours that first came to mind, they found that anger was associated with red. Finally, a recent study in which 5- to 11-year-olds were asked to draw human figures suggested that red is associated with mixed emotions (Burkitt & Watling, 2015). To sum up, developmental studies have mostly investigated the emotional meaning of colour in terms of preference, and mostly through drawings, which limits the types of measures that can be carried out. Moreover, findings on the development of color–emotion associations are far from clear-cut. The way in which humans associate colour and emotion can be explained by two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: colour–meaning associations may be the result of (1) evolution (i.e. phylogenetic hypothesis), and (2) learning about contingencies in our environment (i.e. ontogenetic hypothesis). Nevertheless, colour–meaning associations are now being explored in a growing body of adult studies, with the colour red being a particular focus of research in different domains. To the extent that colours are linked to emotion, they can be viewed as having evolved a corollary psychologyical function, and thus of being capable of modulating a variety of human behaviours. Several studies where people were placed in an achievement context and exposed to colour (e.g. the colour of a test cover or progress bar) have shown lower performance when people are exposed to red, rather than another colour (i.e. green or achromatic) (see Elliot, 2015, for a recent review; Elliot et al., 2007; Gnambs, Appel & Batinic, 2010; Houtman & Notebaert, 2013; Mehta & Zhu, 2009; Shi, Zhang & Jiang, 2015; Thorstenson, 2015). In athletics competitions, studies have revealed that red is related to threat that is motivationally positive for those wearing a red shirt (i.e. implying victory) and motiva- tionally negative for those who see their opponent wearing a red shirt (i.e. implying defeat) (e.g. Hill & Barton, 2005; Krenn, 2014; Recours & Briki, 2015; Ten Velden, Baas, Shalvi, Preenen & De Dreu, 2012). Taken together, these findings therefore argue in favour of the colour red being negatively valenced, conveying the notions of threat, dominance and danger. Although the above findings are consistent with the red–negative association, several interesting studies have also directly tested it, using what are known as crossmodal correspondences (Spence, 2011). These suggest that semantic material is processed faster and more accurately (Moller, Elliot & Maier, 2009), or is more convincing (Gerend & Sias, 2009), when it is both negatively valenced and presented in red. Similarly, emotional words appear to be better memorized when the evoked emotion and its ink colour are congruent (e.g. negative/red vs. positive/green) (Kuhbandner & Pekrun, 2013). Interestingly, in order to test the meaning of red, some recent studies have used emotional facial expressions, the most widely studied modality of emotional expression. Palmer and colleagues (2013) found that when participants had to choose the colour (out of a possible 37) that was most/least consistent with an emotional face, angry faces were linked to reddish colours (Palmer, Schloss, Xu & Prado-Leo'n, 2013). In a face categorization task, Young, Elliot, Feltman and Ambady (2013) showed that red priming facilitates the categorization of angry versus happy faces, compared with green or achromatic priming. Finally, Gil and Le Bigot (2015) presented ambiguous faces (e.g. surprised faces; see Adolphs, 2002; Kim, Somerville, Johnstone, Polis, Alexander et al., 2004) against four kinds of coloured background (i.e. red, green, and two controls: mixed and achromatic). Participants had to say as rapidly as possible whether each face expressed a broadly positive or a broadly negative emotion. Findings revealed that when ambiguous faces were shown against the red background, they were categorized as expressing a negative emotion significantly more often than when they were presented with a different background. The fact that the same faces were perceived of as expressing a negative emotion when they were given a red back- ground argues in favour