Studio Brief - Primary Research, Emotional responce

One of Hitlers propaganda guide lines was to 'Avoid abstract ideas and appeal instead to the emotions'. With this in mind i wanted to conducted primary research about emotional responses and then to see if colours could strengthen or weaken these emotional triggers.

What i want to find out

What i want the research to find out is to whether or not peoples emotions can be heightened or not by certain colours. So will a darker colour make an image more distressing compared to the same image in a lighter colour.

The Experiment

For the research, i had an image of an abused, homeless dog and having an image like this will start to trigger emotion response from people. I then asked around 12 people the following questions based on this image:

1. Do you find this image emotionally sad?
2. On a scale from 1-10 how distressing is this image?
3. How does it make you feel?

Answers to these questions were:

1. All twelve people said they found this image distressing.
2. 7 was the average number on how distressing the image was.
3. Some words were: Sad, upsetting, distressed, emotional, helpless and angry

I then had another sheet of paper with 4 images on. Each image was of the same dog but all had different colour overlay on them. I then chose the first image, which would be the red overlay and then asked these questions:

1. Is it still equally distressing as the original?
2. On a scale from 1-10 how distressing is this colour?
3. Does it still make you feel the same?

So after i asked these questions for the red, i then moved on to the blue overlay then green and lastly the yellow to see how they all compared to the original.

Results

Red overlay:

1. 10/12 said it was still as distressing as the original.
2. 7 was the average number on how distressing the image was.
3. All 12 said it still made you feel the same as the original image.

Blue overlay: 

1. 5/12 said it was still as distressing as the original.
2. 3 was the average number on how distressing the image was.
3. 6 said it still made you feel the same as the original image.

Green overlay: 

1. 3/12 said it was still as distressing as the original.
2. 5 was the average number on how distressing the image was.
3. 5 said it still made you feel the same as the original image.

Yellow overlay: 

1. 4/12 said it was still as distressing as the original.
2. 3 was the average number on how distressing the image was.
3. 2 said it still made you feel the same as the original image.

Outcome

The outcome to this research was very informative. It seems that colours do really increase and decrease emotional responses to certain images. It was amazing to see people extremely sad and distressed when they saw the original image of the dog, but then once the same image was overlayed with another colour they found it more distressing and in some cases not distressing at all. Red was the only colour that was equally and more distressing then the original image and this probably because red is associated with danger and warnings, it's also a warm colour which adds to the effects of heat and again, danger. On the other hand lighter colours such as blue, green and yellow all made everyone a little calmer as the majority agreed that the image was less distressing. This probably because lighter colours are cooling and are associated with nature, organic, cool and stress free environments.