Influencing our emotions, behavior and a doorway to our personality
Color Psychology
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions,” the vibrant painter Pablo Picasso once remarked. Artists, interior decorators, marketing gurus, designers have long known the influence of color in everyday life. Color is a defining tool assigning meaning to our surroundings, reflecting our inner responses, an intensely subjective spatial response to tints. They can also be linked to physiological changes like fluctuating metabolism, blood pressure spikes and mood swings. Epicenter to how we dress, decorate, date and purchase.
The expression of personality with color can be both a cognizant and unconscious expression. Extensive research has been conducted in the area of how different colors affect emotion and behavior. Broadly speaking there are two types of personalities. Outgoing, gregarious disposition who are more social, talkative, at ease meeting new people, making friends whose wardrobes are full of bright colors and bold patterns. By contrast, introverted temperament will wear de-saturated, muted colors closer to the grayscale. Experts have further outlined four hues that are aligned with personal characteristics. Red represents exciting and powerful. Yellow is for free spirited and fun loving. Blue embraces calm and tend to be serious and White indicates peaceful and kind. Increasingly color psychology has become central to predicting and pegging marketing trends, be it selling cars, designing homes, clothes or consumer products.
Symbolism & History
Colors are silent but strong, visual communicators and expressions of our nature. Studies have indicated that certain shades have a more definitive impact on the human brain. This is the foundation of psychology of color. The study of color in relation to humans is revealing and thought provoking. In part it is human beings capacity to assign value to objects in their environment. In other words without color, our world would feel eroded and monochromatic.
Color is generally seen as being gender neutral. Once color is transmitted from the eye to the brain, it releases hormones that affect our emotions – either positively or negatively. These emotions are crucial propellers of our behavior, setting in motion our actions. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to decode the colors of the rainbow. Before he started experimenting with his “celebrated phenomenon of colors” people of that age thought that color was a mix of light and darkness. Newton set up a prism near his window and projected a beautiful spectrum 22 feet onto the far wall, refracting light. Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light alone was responsible for color. His most useful idea for artists was his conceptual arrangement of colors around the circumference of a circle, which allowed painters to arrange primary and complementary colors around the wheel, which is used to this day.
Empower yourself
Being aware of Color psychology is to empower oneself. Knowing colors affect emotions and behaviors is a powerful tool which we can add to our arsenal to amplify our emotional quotient. No matter what colors we are partial to, or how we choose to dress, decorate or present our home or workspace, if we stay true to our inner self, we feel better, think more clearly and behave more truthfully.
We can also learn to decode the message from advertisers that inundate us and find a way through the labyrinth to buy and choose only what we want. The immersive joy of color is so alluring, let us soak in it, harness it for our happiness - join hands with me!
We are stronger together
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