SURVEY
The word clouds below are representative of the survey responses that I received. Before going more in depth into the survey data and results, I wanted to provide a visual presentation of people's emotional responses. Each word cloud corresponds with a different color, and larger words mean those words were more common among the responses.
If you participated in my survey, look through the word clouds and try to find your responses. You should be able to see how similar or different your responses were from others.
Results
Positive/Negative/Neutral: I organized the responses into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. If one response fell under more than one category (for example, the respondent wrote "relaxed, sad" for one color), I counted it for both of the relevant categories.
Orange: 71.9% positive, 15.6% negative, 12.5% neutral
Red: 45.2% positive, 52.4% negative, 2.4% neutral
Green: 80% positive, 16.7% negative, 3.3% neutral
Purple: 60.5% positive, 23.7% negative, 15.8% neutral
Yellow: 91.9% positive, 8.1% negative, 0% neutral
Blue: 68.4% positive, 26.3% negative, 5.3% neutral
Gender Differences: Both men and women had a higher percentage of positive responses to most of the colors. Additionally, both men and women had an overall negative response to red. The only difference I found between gender was that men responded more negatively (60%) to purple than women.
Limitations: Due to the nature of my survey, I was unable to make some of the observations that I originally planned. I wanted to see if there were differences in emotional responses to color based on age and gender. Almost all of my survey responses were from 18-25 year olds, which left me unable to assess any differences based on age. Additionally, I received a small number of responses from men, so while I do make some inferences based on gender, future studies may be needed to test these results further.
Comparison to Hemphill: I used a similar categorization method to Hemphill (positive, negative, no emotion) with my responses. In his study, Hemphill assesses the difference in responses between men and women for brighter and darker colors. He found that people responded more positively to brighter colors and more negatively to darker colors. Additionally, men tended to respond more positively than women to darker colors (Hemphill, 1996). Due to the scope of my project, I only included brighter colors in my survey so I am unable to make these comparisons.
Through my research, I did find that overall there was a positive response to bright colors. The only exception, however, is red, which received a higher percentage of negative responses.