Logan Voss
Various things in life affect our actions, ideals, and thinking processes. Color is a part of our lives, and as we experience colors daily, we may notice changes in our behavior. Color has various effects on our behavior, and understanding them will help us understand how we can change ourselves.
Colors as Various Representations
Throughout the centuries, humans have used colors to represent different topics, such as danger, emotions, energy, gender, and many other things. The continuous use of color for representation has programmed our brains to associate different aspects of life with a certain color, which may be a general idea, or one adopted by a group.
For example, when people see red, it is normally associated with danger or warning; however, in ancient Rome, red was adorned by nobility and Roman generals. Colors have various meanings to different people, which have affected how our society functions and how we communicate with each other.
White is a common color representing purity and a clean slate. Many manufactured items, especially in mechanical and electrical engineering, have a white coating to make them look new and pristine. This image of elegance is why white is the most popular car color in the world, especially among luxury cars, making them look more valuable and pure.
How Color Affects Emotion
Colors and emotions are some of the most common pairings people learn from a young age. Many of our emotions have associations with different colors, such as blue linking to sadness and pink associating with love. Some colors may have related to more specific moods, such as aquamarine relating to feelings of good fortune and amber inviting warm energy.
Our color association with emotions comes from the brain’s processing of color and may cause the arousal of certain feelings and thoughts depending on the brightness or tone of the color. This vast array of emotions is linked to how color affects your daily behavior, as constant exposure to these colors will invoke certain emotions, eventually changing your thought process in response to these colors.
Daily Exposure to Color
Exposure to certain stimuli daily will cause acute behavior to become more frequent until they eventually become absorbed into your daily habits. You will notice the effects of color on your daily behavior after constantly seeing a color, especially one that invokes strong emotions. Seeing colors will also manifest thoughts that go along with emotions.
When you see yellow, you may feel a lighter feeling akin to happiness and delight, which may cause thoughts of happiness to produce. This idea is similar to the effects of being in a dimly lit area with gray concrete walls and floors that make you feel more depressed and bored.
It’s important to opt for the right colors around you as they will eventually affect your mood. Seeing these colors consistently will cause you to have a change in your constant mood, the way you think, and your overall behavior.
