Color Influence

Report

Subject:

Color (Psychological aspects)

Personality (Research)

Personality assessment (Research)

Authors:

Lange, Rense

Rentfrow, Jason

Pub Date:

12/01/2007

Publication:

Name: North American Journal of Psychology Publisher: North American Journal of Psychology Audience: AcademicFormat: Magazine/Journal Subject: Education; Psychology and mental healthCopyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 North American Journal of Psychology ISSN: 1527-7143

Issue:

Date: Dec, 2007 Source Volume: 9 Source Issue: 3

Topic:

Event Code: 310 Science & research Canadian Subject Form: Colour

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

As was anticipated, the present findings clearly indicate that people's color preferences, as assessed via the Dewey Color System Test, indeed provide meaningful information about their personalities, interpersonal styles, and behaviors. In particular, the data indicated that this test predicted with considerable precision all six of the Basic Interest Scales of Strong's Interest Inventory (Harmon, et al., 1994), and nearly all of the sixteen Primary Factors of Cattell's 16PF (Russel & Karol, 2002). As such, the present findings show far greater consistency than do those obtained in earlier research inspired by Luscher's (1971) work (cf., French & Alexander, 1972; Picco & Dzindolet, 1994; Seefeldt, 1979; Stimpson & Stimpson, 1979; Stone, 2001, 2003).

As was already found earlier by Seefeld (1973), men prefer yellow far less often than do women. Despite the finding of several statistically significant differences between men and women, our neural net approach proved of little use in inferring respondents' color preferences from their sex or vice-versa. It appears that the statistically significant associations are simply too weak to yield clearly identifiable effects. Note that this situation may well explain the inconsistent pattern of sex differences observed in earlier research (cf., Seefeldt, 1979 vs. Stimpson & Stimpson, 1979). By contrast, the findings provided strong support for the many-to-one hypothesis. Specifically, even when maximally different respondent configurations are constructed via the cluster analysis, highly similar color preferences continue to prevail. Note that our test of this hypothesis essentially relies on non-rejection of [H.sub.0]. However, the observed [lambda] statistics were so low as to be meaningless, and there is little reason to believe that these low values are the result of sampling biases.

A number of additional issues remain. For instance, it is not clear at this point whether our findings regarding personality must be attributed to the differences between the colors contained in the Dewey Color System Test and Luscher's color test, whether neural nets simply provide a superior

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