“Blue is calming,” “red is exciting,” “yellow makes you happy” — claims like these are everywhere, from interior design tips to articles about drawing. Some rest on real research; some are exaggerations.
Here’s what psychologists actually know about color and emotion, which popular claims didn’t hold up, and what’s worth taking from it for your drawings.
What’s known: associations really are shared
In 2020, an international team led by Domicele Jonauskaite published a study in Psychological Science on color–emotion associations. More than 4,500 participants from 30 countries chose which emotions they linked with each color. The associations turned out to be strikingly similar across countries: red was most often linked with love and anger, yellow with joy, black with sadness. At the same time, language and culture added their own shading: the closer two countries were geographically and linguistically, the more alike their associations.
So links between colors and feelings aren’t made up. They really are widespread.
What didn’t hold up: pink and aggression
In the 1970s, the idea spread in the US that a particular shade of pink — known as Baker-Miller pink — reduces aggression. Holding cells and rooms were painted pink. Later tests didn’t find the effect: a 2015 study in Swiss detention cells (Genschow and colleagues), for example, found that pink walls didn’t reduce aggression compared with gray ones.
It’s a good example of an idea that sounded convincing, was repeated widely, and didn’t survive testing.
Go carefully with other bold claims
- “Red whets the appetite,” “blue boosts productivity” — research on topics like these gives mixed results; effects, where they appear at all, are small and depend on the setting.
- An association isn’t an influence. That people link yellow with joy doesn’t mean a yellow page will change anyone’s mood.
- Personal experience counts. For one person blue is the color of the sea on vacation; for another, of hospital walls.
What to take from it for your drawings
The course’s lesson on color includes a list of common associations — and the same lesson makes the key point: how we perceive color is highly personal. That matches what the research shows: associations are widely shared, yet everyone experiences color in their own way.
So for your drawings:
- Choose the colors you like today, not the ones that are supposed to mean something.
- Notice your own associations. After a drawing, note why you picked those colors; over time this becomes your personal “language of color.”
- Don’t expect color to do something. In a drawing, color is part of the process and the result — not a tool that makes something happen.
What comes next
How to pick a palette is in 12 Color Palettes to Try, and how to spread colors across the page is in How to Color Your Drawing. The Neurojournal course has a lesson on colors in “The alphabet” module; the first module is open without an account — start there.
