| Color psychology and the subsequent impact on the viewer is a body of research that began many years ago, but until recently was not of great interest. Elliot and Maier (2007) developed color in context theory, which initiated a larger body of literature examining the impact of color on human behavior as related to unconsciously communicated messages and the context in which the color is viewed. One specific branch of the research examined the red achievement effect, or the tendency for individuals to perform worse on performance achievement tasks after exposure to the color red. This effect has been found to exist within adults and high school age adolescents, but had not yet been examined with a younger population. This study was an experiment with fourth grade children to gain further information on the red achievement effect. Results demonstrated that fourth grade students exposed to the color red as compared to black did not score significantly lower on an achievement-based task. This finding may be related to a lack of the effect in a younger population, or potentially to limitations inherent to the study in regard to the ability to detect meaningful differences between groups. Future research should continue to expand the red achievement effect to a younger population to gain deeper insight into the origins of the red achievement effect. |
