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A qualitative and quantitative study of color emotion using valence-arousal

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Abstract

This paper describes qualitative and quantitative analysis of color emotion dimension expression using a standard device-independent colorimetric system. To collect color emotion data, 20 subjects are required to report their emotion responses, using a valence-arousal emotion model, to 52 color samples that are chosen from CIELAB Lch color spaces. Qualitative analysis, including analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson’s correlation and Spearman’s rank correlation, shows that significant differences exist between responses to achromatic and chromatic stimuli, but there are no significant differences between chromatic samples. There is a positive linear relationship between lightness/chroma and valence-arousal dimensions. Subsequently, several classic predictors are used to quantitatively predict emotion induced by color attributes. Furthermore, several explicit color emotion models are developed by using multiple linear regression with stepwise and pace regression. Experimental results show that chroma and lightness have stronger effects on emotions than hue, which is consistent with our qualitative results and other psychological studies. Arousal has greater predictive value than valence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Lab of Computing and Communicating Software of Anhui Province, School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

    Shangfei Wang & Rui Ding

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  1. Shangfei Wang
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  2. Rui Ding
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Correspondence to Shangfei Wang.

Additional information

Shangfei Wang received her MSc in Circuits and Systems, and her PhD in Signal and Information Processing from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From 2004 to 2005, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Kyushu University, Japan. She is currently an associate professor of the School of Computer Science and Technology, USTC. Dr. Wang is an IEEE member. Her research interests cover computation intelligence, affective computing, multimedia computing, information retrieval, and artificial environment design. She has authored or coauthored over 40 publications.

Rui Ding received his BSc from the School of Basic Medical Science from Anhui Medical University, China, in 2006. He received his MSc from the School of Computer Science and Technology from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 2010.

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Wang, S., Ding, R. A qualitative and quantitative study of color emotion using valence-arousal. Front. Comput. Sci. 6, 469–476 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-0154-y

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