The Relationship Between Warm And Cold Colors And Happiness: A Metaphorical Perspective

To explore happiness metaphor is of great importance to understanding happiness.Metaphor is a concept that people express and understand abstract,intangible and complex target domain by the specific,tangible and simple concept of source domain.Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)assumes that the representation and processing of concepts affected perception experience.Color is a ubiquitous perceptual experience.It affects individual behavior and mental function.Previous studies have found cold/warm colors are linked to the metaphor of the concept of emotion.Warm colors arouse pleasant experiences,while cool colors associate with clam and sadness.Happiness is a state of good balance of emotions and the whole of the interaction of many factors such as emotion,cognition and culture.Although corpus studies found that warmth is a metaphor for happiness,few studies focused on the relationship between cold/warm color and happiness.Happiness researches mainly include the understanding of happiness concept and the sense of happiness.This study aims to investigate the influence of cold/warm color on the processing of happiness by changing the background color,and probe into the relationship between the preference of color and the sense of happiness.This study conducted a questionnaire survey and three experiments.In experiment 1,we used the study used a questionnaire to explore the relationship between warm color preference and happiness.In experiment 2,the study used vocabulary judgment task examined the effects of cold/warm color on the processing of happiness words and unhappiness words,and the experiment material was evaluated by 30 students of Chinese major.In Experiment 2,the concept of happiness was manipulated from the lexical level.Experiment 3 further allows individuals to describe happiness at sentence level.The future thinking task coincided with the requirement of experiment 3,and it refers to an individual’s imagination of an event that may happen in the future.The form of the event is usually a sentence(5 years later,I will find a good friend of the same spirit,and work hard together).We used future thinking task to explore the effects of cold/warm color on the number of future happiness events and degree of happiness events.Experiment 4 used mood-induced paradigm to explore the influence of happiness Concept on drink color preference,in order to verify whether the metaphorical mapping between happiness concept and warm and cold color concept was bidirectional.The results showed that:(1)The results showed that the degree of orange preference in warm color system was highly correlated with experiential happiness and trait happiness,while that in cold color system was not significantly correlated with experiential happiness and trait happiness.(2)There were no significant difference between happiness words and unhappiness words under the cold color background,but under the warm color background happiness words RT was shorter than unhappiness words.(3)Individuals have imagined more future happiness events than future unhappiness events under the warm color background,cold color background does not.(4)The results showed that when recalling different types of events,there was a significant difference in the desire score of orange drinks..To sum up,this study proves the psychological reality of the combination of"warm color-happiness".In addition,the most important finding in this study is that this metaphor association will promote the processing and production of the concept of happiness.The present study provides experimental evidence of the Embodied cognition.