The Good, the Bad, and the Red: Implicit Color-Valence Associations Across Cultures

Autor(en)
Claudia Kawai, Yang Zhang, Gáspár Lukács, Wenyi Chu, Chaoyi Zheng, Cijun Gao, Davood Gozli, Yonghui Wang, Ulrich Ansorge
Abstrakt

Cultural differences—as well as similarities—have been found in explicit color-emotion associations between Chinese and Western populations. However, implicit associations in a cross-cultural context remain an understudied topic, despite their sensitivity to more implicit knowledge. Moreover, they can be used to study color systems—that is, emotional associations with one color in the context of an opposed one. Therefore, we tested the influence of two different color oppositions on affective stimulus categorization: red versus green and red versus white, in two experiments. In Experiment 1, stimuli comprised positive and negative words, and participants from the West (Austria/Germany), and the East (Mainland China, Macau) were tested in their native languages. The Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction effect than the Mainland Chinese (but not the Macanese) group for red-green but not for red-white opposition. To explore color-valence interaction effects independently of word stimulus differences between participant groups, we used affective silhouettes instead of words in Experiment 2. Again, the Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction than the Chinese group in red-green opposition, while effects in red-white opposition did not differ between cultures. Our findings complement those from explicit association research in an unexpected manner: Where explicit measures showed similarities between cultures (associations for red and green), our results revealed differences; and where explicit measures showed differences (associations with white), our results showed similarities, underlining the value of applying comprehensive measures in cross-cultural research on cross-modal associations.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Psychologie der Kognition, Emotion und Methoden, Forschungsverbund Kognitionswissenschaft, Forschungsplattform Mediatisierte Lebenswelten: Die narrativen Konstruktionen, Verbindungen und Aneignungen Jugendlicher
Externe Organisation(en)
Shaanxi Normal University, Nexus International School, Central China Normal University, University of Macau
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/fa7k9
Publikationsdatum
11-2021
ÖFOS 2012
501006 Experimentalpsychologie, 501011 Kognitionspsychologie
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/the-good-the-bad-and-the-red-implicit-colorvalence-associations-across-cultures(c1f99285-8229-4367-b3ae-0b72311eee14).html