Without realizing it, our bodies react to changes in our surrounding. An obvious example is if you had to sit in a room with a very annoying song, played at a high pitch and excessively loud. You would naturally become very irritated and mood would worsen. The color of the walls in a room is a huge factor on sub-conscience mood changes.
The team of Wenjuan Lin, Jianlin Ji, Hua Chen, and Chenyu Ye, with the financial support of the Youth Foundation of Zhongshan Hospital, set out to determine the optimum color for a psychological counseling room. To do this, they conducted an initial experiment that had 42 knowing participants were gauged on what color they preferred. The colors were created using the mathematical equation of the CIELAB color and lighting formula, which denoted a numerical value to each color based on its lightness, greenness vs redness, and yellowness vs blueness. This seems to be the most effective way in ensuring consistency in colors and finding a pattern of causation between specific colors and lighting. Furthermore, the participants filled out the Affective Appraisal Scale, which asked them to quantify emotions the colors evoked.
Participants were told there were no right nor wrong answers before filling out the Affective Appraisal Scale.
I am impressed by the level of attention to detail that the team of experimenters demonstrated by their report. Using a software, they were able to find 15 variations of the most pleasant color, for experiment 2. The response surface method (RSM) combined experimental strategies, mathematical methods, and inferences based on statistics to create these colors using the CIELAB color creator.
Experiment 2 Color Samples
For unknown reasons, only 33 people participated in the second part of the experiment. Participants were placed in a room and the colors were projected on a projector screen 2.0 meters away. This experiment begins to get even more complex when the experimenters calculated the signal-to-noise ratio of the noise in the room. An optimal ratio was measured by Adeq Precision. A good ratio is greater than 4. The room used for the experiment had a ratio of 9.941. This is an example of the lengths the experimenters went to in order to cancel out the possibility of a confounding factor influencing the participants and then the results.
This is the 3-D plot of the total desirability of the colors.
Using the numerical labels found to be the most desirable in the graph above, this shade of blue was calculated to be the most desirable color.
This shade of blue was determined to be the most desirable color. This experiment effectively rules out confounding variables and chance, which is why it proves a causal relationship between color and desirability and mood. The researchers focused on the most desirable color for a psychological counseling room because that is where a person is the most emotionally vulnerable and can be easily influenced. However, while the experiment found a result through precision, I think it can be improved by increasing the sample size. It wouldn’t be possible to conduct a double blind placebo experiment because subjects were forced to quantify they’re emotions and reactions to colors. As blue is a color that is normally associated with tranquility and general calmness, I am not surprised by the results at all. Although the experiment was designed to find the most desirable color for a counseling room, I believe blue can be used to increase mood in many other things that are not limited to the color of walls (clothes, shoes, cars, technology, etc.).
Works Cited
“Optimal Color Design of Psychological Counseling Room by Design of Experiments and Response Surface Methodology” http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0090646#authcontrib