Abstract
Colour-emotion association data show a universal consistency in colour-emotion associations, apart from emotion associations with PURPLE. Possibly, its heterogeneity was due to different cognates used as basic colour terms between languages. We analysed emotion associations with PURPLE across 30 populations, 28 countries, and 16 languages (4,008 participants in total). Crucially, these languages used the cognates of purple, lilac, or violet to denote the basic PURPLE category. We found small but systematic affective differences between these cognates. They were ordered as purple > lilac > violet on valence, arousal, and power biases. Statistically, the cognate purple was the most strongly biased towards associations with positive emotions, and lilac was biased more strongly than violet. Purple was more biased towards high power emotions than violet, but cognates did not differ on arousal biases. Additionally, affective biases differed by population, suggesting high variability within each cognate. Thus, cognates partly account for inconsistencies in the meaning of PURPLE, without explaining their origins.
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Notes
We followed a reviewer’s suggestion by calculating an alternative bias score, which weighs the average number of associated emotions by intensity. For valence, we calculated the valence intensity bias = average intensitypositive – average intensitynegative. We calculated analogue intensity biases for arousal and power scores. Repeating the statistical analyses with these alternative intensity bias scores, we obtained comparable results to those with our initial intensity bias scores. We report results on these initial scores to facilitate comparability between studies (Jonauskaite et al., 2020b, 2021). We provide the alternative intensity bias scores in our data file in open access: https://osf.io/ea98m/
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank collaborators of the International Colour-Emotion Association Survey who contributed to translations and data collection (also see them listed as co-authors in Jonauskaite et al., 2020a, Psychological Science).
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This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, providing a Doc.CH and Postdoc.Mobility fellowship grants to DJ (P0LAP1_175055; P500PS_202956) and a project funding grant to CM (100014_182138), supporting DE’s doctoral studies.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Déborah Epicoco and Domicele Jonauskaite. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Mari Uusküla, Christine Mohr, and Domicele Jonauskaite, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Participation was voluntary. Participants provided informed consent by proceeding with the survey after reading the first information page. The study was conducted in accordance with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2013). We received ethics approval from the Research Ethics Commission of the University of Lausanne (C_SSP_032020_00003). Most of the data used in this study have been published in previous investigations of colour-emotion associations (Jonauskaite et al., 2020a, 2020b) and are publicly accessible (https://forsbase.unil.ch/project/study-public-overview/16941/0/). We provide data from the current study on the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/ea98m/.
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Uusküla, M., Mohr, C., Epicoco, D. et al. Is Purple Lost in Translation? The Affective Meaning of Purple, Violet, and Lilac Cognates in 16 Languages and 30 Populations. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 853–868 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09920-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09920-5