User:Marleywdunn/Color psychology

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= Color psychology = Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior. Color influences perceptions that are not obvious, such as the taste of food. Colors have qualities that can cause certain emotions in people. Similarly, the colors people choose to make art with in art therapy settings can reflect certain emotions that they want to convey. Colors can also enhance the effectiveness of placebos. For example, red or orange pills are generally used as stimulants. How color influences individuals may differ depending on age, gender, and culture. For instance, heterosexual men tend to report that red outfits enhance female attractiveness, while heterosexual females deny any outfit color impacting that of men. Although color associations can vary contextually between cultures, color preference is to be relatively uniform across gender and race.

Color psychology is also widely used in marketing and branding. Marketers see color as important, as color can influence a consumers' emotions and perceptions about goods and services. Logos for companies are important, since the logos can attract more customers. This happens when customers believe the company logo matches the personality of the goods and services, such as the color pink heavily used on Victoria's Secret branding. Colors are also important for window displays in stores. Research shows that colors such as red tended to attract spontaneous purchasers, despite cool colors such as blue being more favorable. Red and yellow, as a combination, can stimulate hunger, which may help to explain, in part, the success of fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, and In-N-Out Burger. The phenomenon has been referred to as the "ketchup & mustard" theory.

Influence of color on perception
'''Multiple researchers propose one factor in the evolution of primate trichromatic color vision is to allow for better perception of others' emotions or condition which can prove highly useful for complex social interaction. For example, flushed or pale skin can non-verbally communicate whether they are excited or sickly.'''

Color has a large impact on food. Color also affects how people perceive the edibility and flavor of foods and drinks. Not only the color of the food itself but also that of everything in the eater's field of vision can affect this. For example, in food stores, bread is normally sold in packaging decorated or tinted with golden or brown tones to promote the idea of home baked and oven freshness. People can mistake a cherry flavored drink for being lime or lemon flavored if that drink was a green color. Additionally, a flavor can be intensified by a color. People can rate a brown M&M as more chocolate flavored than a green M&M based on color. '''This interaction can be mediated by our perceptions as well, especially depending on cultural expectation. Research in the UK demonstrated that individuals receiving a brown drink would have different expectations for the taste (i.e. expecting a Cola) while someone from Taiwan may expect a grape flavored drink because of popular drinks in their culture. '''

Color and time perception (move this under "influence of color on perception" section)
Recent results showed that the perceived duration of a red screen was longer than was that of a blue screen. The results reflected sex differences; men, but not women, overestimated the duration of the red screen. Additionally, the reaction times to a red screen were faster than those to a blue screen. Participants who reacted quickly to a red screen overestimated its duration. In a demo with 150 people chosen at random, it was found that inside a pod bathed in blue color the average perceived duration of a minute was 11 seconds shorter than in a pod bathed in red color. However, another study looking at perceived duration found opposite results regarding blue and red stimuli 

Art Therapy
Art therapy is a separate but related field of applied psychology. It comes from psychoanalytic theories in the 1970’s that argued that some of our emotions and experiences cannot just be expressed in words, but in images and colors. One intersection where color psychology could be of use to art therapists is in evaluating what certain colors mean to clients when they use them to create art pieces. Even the lack of color use can be an important detail in art therapy, as people struggling with depression tend to use less color when they are painting. It’s also suggested that by focusing on color use rather than the resulting image made by a client, you can avoid clients’ anxiety over producing a “good” product and focus more on what the colors they used mean to them in order to start a dialogue about their feelings.

Chromotherapy
Chromotherapy is a treatment method adapted from ancient color-based practices that utilizes wavelengths in the visual spectrum (colors we can see) to treat different conditions. This therapy has been researched to treat multiple physiological and psychiatric conditions, such as seasonal affective disorder (SAD), age-related cognitive decline, depression, and hypertension among others. However, many in the healthcare field believe that chromotherapy does not have a robust research backing and have described it as a pseudoscience. Other sources claim that while certain colors have been shown as beneficial to wellbeing, the clear definition of what wavelengths are beneficial and exactly how these benefits occur is not clear enough to put them to use in a medical setting.

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK
'Multiple researchers propose one factor in the evolution of primate'' trichromatic color vision is to allow for better perception of others' emotions or condition which can prove highly useful for complex social interaction. For example, flush or pale skin can non-verbally communicate whether they are excited or sick.'''

Color has a large impact on food. Color also affects how people perceive the edibility and flavor of foods and drinks. Not only the color of the food itself but also that of everything in the eater's field of vision can affect this. For example, in food stores, bread is normally sold in packaging decorated or tinted with golden or brown tones to promote the idea of home baked and oven freshness. People can mistake a cherry flavored drink for being lime or lemon flavored if that drink was a green color. Additionally, a flavor can be intensified by a color. People can rate a brown M&M as more chocolate flavored than a green M&M based on color. '''This interaction can be mediated by our perceptions as well, especially depending on cultural expectation. Research in the UK demonstrated that individuals receiving a brown drink would have different expectations for the taste (i.e. expecting a Cola) while someone from Taiwan may expect a grade (grade???) flavored drink because of popular drinks in their culture. '''

Please see above for suggested edits in italics.

PEER REVIEW- NICK SLATSKY
Art therapy is a separate but related field of applied psychology.. One intersection where color psychology could be useful is evaluating which color a client uses when creating nonrepresentational art pieces.

Color and time perception

Recent results showed that the perceived duration of a red screen was longer than was that of a blue screen. The results reflected sex differences; men, but not women, overestimated the duration of the red screen. However, another study looking at perceived duration found opposite results regarding blue and red stimuli . Additionally, the reaction times to a red screen were faster than those to a blue screen. Participants who reacted quickly to a red screen overestimated its duration. In a demo with 150 people chosen at random, it was found that inside a pod bathed in blue color the average perceived duration of a minute was 11 seconds shorter than in a pod bathed in red color.

Changes in italics

Response to peer edits
'''My peer review from Anjdarji really only included positive feedback so there weren't any instituted changes. From Nick Slatsky's peer review, I added the information to the Color and time perception section because it offers a differing point of view from the information already in the section and makes it less biased. For his input on the art therapy section I decided to not change the sentence because as a student who has studied art therapy techniques briefly I know that art therapists cannot really evaluate what colors mean when client use them, it's more about discussing what colors mean to the patient personally, which is what is meant in the source used so I think my original sentence conveys the information more accurately. The feedback from Asherm4802 lead me to add a sentence to the lead section mentioning color psychology's applications to art therapy'''. I will also search for a good image to place next to the discussion of food packaging colors.