Being Smart About Color

Dr. Max Lüscher is a man that has done a lot on color psychology. This is a quiz he made: http://www.colorquiz.com/quiz.php.

Colors:

Meanings based on Dr. Max Lüscher

Blue: “Depth of Feeling” passive, concentric, tranquility, calm,tenderness

Green: “Elasticity of Will” passive, concentric, defensive, persistence,self-esteem/assertion, pride, control

Red: “Force of Will” ex-centric, active aggressive, competitive, action,desire, excitement

Yellow: “Spontaneity” ex-centric, active, projective, aspiring,expectancy, exhilaration

Violet: “Identification” unrealistic/ wishful fulfillment, charm,enchantment

Brown: Bodily senses, indicates the body’s condition

Black: Nothingness, renunciation, surrender or relinquishment

Grey: Non-involvement and concealment

Smart Color Picks from http://www.scienceofpeople.com/2013/01/10-ways-color-affects-your-mood/

What Color You Should Make Your Desktop: Green

What color you choose for your desktop and the colors you choose for your website can greatly affect your productivity. The color green is restful for eyes and produces the least amount of eyestrain. This is a good choice for computer desktops if you are in front of a screen for many hours.

What Color to Wear for a Workout: Orange

Orange is a color of stimulation and enthusiasm. Orange is a nice mix of red’s passion and yellow’s joy. Research has found that orange increases oxygen supply to the brain, produces an energizing effect, and stimulates brain activity.

What Color to Wear on a Date (if you’re a woman): Red

Red is the color of passion and gets blood pumping. Women can wear this to get their date’s heart racing.

What Color to Wear on a Date (if you’re a man): Blue

Blue is the most stable color. Women love seeing stable men. It is also calming and can help relax both you and your date’s nerves.

What to Wear If You Want to Be Seen As Aggressive: Black

Researchers examined statistics from more than 52,000 National Hockey League games and found that teams were penalized more for aggression while wearing black jerseys. (Hockey teams have two color jerseys and switch for home and away games). Interestingly, the NHL in 2003 changed it’s jersey policy so that home teams had to wear white. The authors of the study compared the sets of data and found that the same teams were assessed significantly more penalties for aggression when they wore the black jerseys than when they wore white.

What Colors You Should Paint the Place You Work: Blue and Green

In 1999, researchers at Creighton University found that colors significantly influence employees’ emotions and efficiency. Workers in blue offices felt the most centered, calm and hopeful towards their work. Since blue can lower heart rates and green reduces anxiety and is associated with money, a combination of blue and green is best for the workplace.

What Color You Should Never Wear to Work: Grey

Grey inspires people to be passive, uninvolved and have a lack of energy. If you like wearing grey, pairing it with a brighter color will help offset the effect.

Choosing the color of your office, your clothes or your desktop should not be taken lightly — colors do affect our moods and productivity. However, colors are not the only thing that affects us — one can still be efficient in a grey suit or workout well in a black outfit. But, when given the choice, picking a color that will work with you, and not against you can only help

Colors with our eyesight and more

Colors and our visual perception:

Our moods can, quite literally, color our world — particularly in the case of depression.

Sadness can affect our vision, making the world appear more gray, by impairing the neural processes involved in color perception.

As it turns out, there’s a reason we use colors as a metaphor for emotion, with expressions like “feeling blue” or having a “gray day.”

Our brains make the connection that gray means stress and that blue means laying down and being tired. That’s why whoever first said those two metaphors, somewhere, some reason, actually put thought into the words.

It’s really surprising how many metaphors, idioms, or overall figures of speeches we have that really relate to color.

The findings build on earlier research that investigated the link between mood and perception. Other studies found that when people have a goal — such as the finish line of a race — they may perceive that object to be larger than it really is.

People experiencing fear, on the other hand, may perceive certain things in their environment — such as faces with negative expressions — as more threatening than they actually are.

This is because our emotions carry information about the value of objects, and that information is incorporated into the visual perception of our environment.

The brain’s emotional and perceptual systems don’t seem to be completely distinct from one another, as was previously believed, but instead engage in a dynamic interplay.

Colors and our verbal Perception:

We may have figured out a new method to understand people’s emotions. Even without them telling you! It uses colors. These are the steps:

1. Make a list of colors
2. Split it into dark shades and light shades
3. Have your patient pick a random color

If they picked a dark shades color it means they are sad or whatever treatment they have isn’t going well. On the other hand, if the patient picked a light shades color it means they are doing pretty well.

This works because your mind involuntarily makes the connection that dark shades of color mean sad/bad, while light shades show happiness.

You might think, “why do you need color to understand how someone feels through color if they can just tell you?”

It’s easier and more reliable than listening to what a patient describes as how they feel and what symptoms they are going through for 3 main reasons.

1. They could always lie, for whatever reason
2. They might not understand how they feel
3. They might not know how to explain how they feel

What is very interesting is that this might actually be a better way of capturing a patient’s mood than questions. Non-verbal methods of getting information are sometimes preferable to conversation. Probably because of the fact some people are embarrassed of the symptoms of whatever health conditions they have so they don’t want to explain everything going on with them.

Color Treatment (SAD) and more

Colors affect our memory, mental agility, reaction times, and our physical strength. Volunteers that were shown sunny shades scored 25 percent higher on tests of mental agility than those that were exposed to dull, dreary shades of gray.

When the volunteers were shown brighter colors, their hand-eye coordination increased by 20% while their physical strength increased by around 10%.

This shows that a dose of color can help you feel much happier.

This study may explain why so many people suffer from Seasonal affective disorder, in which a person becomes depressed in winter months when there is a lack of sunlight.

What is SAD?

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that’s related to changes in seasons — SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year. If you’re like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody. Less often, SAD causes depression in the spring or early summer.

Treatment for SAD may include light therapy, psychotherapy and medications. The one we are trying to incorporate is color treatment.

Don’t brush off that yearly feeling as simply a case of the “winter blues” or a seasonal funk that you have to tough out on your own. Take steps to keep your mood and motivation steady throughout the year. Steps including color treatment.

Don’t let SAD make you sad!

 

Uses of Color

With depression it’s hard to tell whether you are naturally sad or have depression. Color can help you understand that.

You can link colors with emotions, then ask someone which color appeals the most to them. If someone is truly depressed they will choose darker colors.                                         If they are naturally sad, they will choose lighter colors.

“I’m feeling blue today,” is a metaphor and surprisingly it also could be a fact depicting that dark shades of blue depict sadness.                                                                                            As it turns out, there is actually a reason we use colors in metaphors.

Color includes how to understand how a person is feeling without them telling you.

Color can be a method of psychological testing that detects depression along with many other emotions.

Other Things Color is Strongly Influencing:

• Emotions
• Depression
• Color Blind way of Life
• Our Lives
• Our Eyesight
• The way we look at Life
• New Technology
• Art
• Disease Overall
• Our Homes
• Our Personalities
• Designs
• People’s Comforts

Color Basics

• Colors play a very important role in our lives as they not only influence our moods, but also stimulate their psychological reactions.
• The colors of our homes deeply impact the happenings around us.
• Our choice of colors effects our attitude and approach towards life.
• Our choice for colors can effect us negatively or positively.
• Colors have the capacity of pacifying our minds and stimulating our energy.
• Our mood, health, and happiness are effected by the colors around us.
• Colors can have emotional, materialistic, intellectual, intuitive, and many other types of influence on humans.
• Each color symbolizes a concept.

You should use the concepts to your advantage. That way, your house and surroundings will affect you in a positive way.

Favorite Colors Mean

If your favorite color is red, you are action oriented with a deep need for physical fulfillment and to experience life through the five senses. You may also have some sort of special connection or love for food.

If orange is your favorite color, you have a great need to be with people, to socialize with them, and be accepted and respected as part of a group. You also have a need for challenges in your life, whether it is physical or social challenges. You are also very energetic.

Choosing yellow as your favorite color means you have a deep need for logical order in your everyday life and to be able to express your individuality by using your logical mind to inspire and create new ideas. Happiness is  placed on a high pedestal in your life.

If green is your favorite, you have a deep need to belong, to love and be loved, and to feel safe and secure. You need acceptance and acknowledgment for the everyday things you do for others – just a ‘thank you’ is sufficient.

Lovers of blue have a deep need to find inner peace and truth, to live their life according to their ideals and beliefs without having to change their inflexible viewpoint of life to satisfy others. They are good at relaxing too.

Indigo lovers have a need to feel in harmony and at one with the Universe and to be accepted by others as the aware and intuitive spiritual beings that they are. They are very creative.

If purple or violet is your favorite color, you have a deep need for emotional security and to create order and perfection in all areas of your life, including your spiritual life. You also have a deep need to initiate and participate in humanitarian projects, helping others in need.

If your personality color is pink you have a deep need to be accepted and loved unconditionally.

If turquoise is your favorite color your deepest need is to create emotional balance in your life, to be able to express your hopes and dreams no matter how idealistic they may be and to make your own way in the world under your own terms.

If your favorite color is magenta, you are a non-conformist who sees life from a different point of view.

Lovers of brown have a deep need for a safe, secure, simple and comfortable existence with supportive family and friends.

Lovers of black have a need for power and control in order to protect their own emotional insecurities.

If white is your personality color, your deepest need is for simplicity in your own life and to be independent and self-reliant so you do not need to depend on anyone else.

With gray as your favorite color, you are the middle of the road type, cool, conserved, composed and reliable. You tend to conform just to keep the peace.

If silver is your favorite, you are intuitive and insightful and have a strong connection with a higher spiritual guidance.

With a personality color gold, you radiate charisma, personality and individuality, making others feel relaxed and valued in your company.

Summaries On Colors

Colors in graphic designs the basics of how people feel about specific colors

Our reactions to color come from way in our past.  There are no magically true answers, but there are generalities that can be understood from decades of research on the patterns of what people think about each color.

 

Red: It contributes many different types of emotions and is one of the emotions with the most widespread range of feelings. It can conduct things like aggression,energeticness(like most warm colors), sweatiness/heat or most commonly an urge to eat. The urge to eat is probably because you can find many edible reddish things in the wild (like tomatoes, apples, cherries, strawberries, dragon fruit, red peppers, red bell peppers etc.). It’s not a good thing to paint the walls of the house when a person has high blood pressure or someone who is  overweight because they will probably want to eat more. Though it is probably good for someone who is sick or underweight based on types of sickness and good in a kitchen. Red is also sometimes associated with love but truth be told when it comes to things like that it’s mostly based on your past experiences with that color.

 

Blue: Makes you feel relaxed some people say it even lowers your energy and makes you not feel like eating. The not feel like eating thing is probably because unlike red you can’t find way too many things that are edible and blue in the wild, sure there are the occasional things like blueberries but seriously, how many things can you find that are not poisonous. Although on the other end for the fact it lowers energy, studies have shown people make around 20% less flaws in their work when the walls of the room they are working in are painted blue versus white. Maybe it’s because blue is the number 1 favorite color people have across the world and people seem to do better and relax in colors they enjoy. It would make sense for me, since the surroundings are nice I feel good or relaxed and work harder like people do when they are around someone/something that they enjoy being around. Instead in this situation it is the color blue, a color people work better when they are around because they like/enjoy being around it. Overall if you are having a tough time deciding what color to paint your bedroom I’d say blue would work pretty well since you can relax well in blue and could make you feel more tired when going to bed. The different shades of blue make a big difference. For example if you are sleeping in a room with light blue walls it is better than a dark blue. Dark blue may feel depressing and is a definite no. The color blue is almost always associated with blue skies, which is a positive thing associated with being outside, relaxing or having fun.

Purple/ violet: Both contain the energy and strength of red with the spirituality and integrity of blue. This is the union of body and soul creating a balance between our physical and our spiritual energies. Purple or violet assists those who seek the meaning of life and spiritual fulfillment – it expands our awareness, connecting us to a higher consciousness. For this reason they are associated with transformation of the soul and the philosophers of the world are often attracted to them. They Relate to the imagination and spirituality. Stimulating the imagination and inspiring high ideals. It is an introspective color, allowing us to get in touch with our deeper thoughts.

Purple: also shows signs of royalty, on the fact that purple is not a very natural color in the wild. Tracing back to our ancestors, seeing purple was not very common. Sure maybe you can see a flower that is purple here and there but it’s not as common as pink or red and green. Purple has power. It has a richness and quality to it that demands respect. Purple is ambitious and self-assured if a color could be something and have a job purple would be some sort of leader.

Violet: is not quite as intense as purple, though its essence is similar. Generally the names are interchangeable and the meaning of the colors is similar.Promote harmony of the mind and the emotions, contributing to mental balance and stability, peace of mind, physically and spiritually between thought and activity. Violet inspires unconditional and selfless love, devoid of ego, encouraging sensitivity and compassion. It can be sensitive to all the different forms of pollution in the world. Unique, individual and independent, not one of the crowd. Artists, musicians, writers, poets and psychics are usually the ones inspired by violet and its magic and mystery.

Green: provides calmness and solace to a person’s vision. In other words, your eyes relax. It is suitable for any place ranging from a classroom, your dining room and bedroom, all the way to your kitchen. You might be thinking, “of all the colors that can make you calm, why is green one of them?” There is a huge and logical explanation for that, but I’ll shorten it down to make it simple and easy to understand. Green makes you calm because there is so much of it from nature. If we didn’t have houses or motels, apartment or hotels, or whatever you use, nature would be where we spend all our time. Apart from its soothing qualities, this color makes a room look decorative, majestic and classy.