The influence of color on emotional perception of natural scenes

Is color a critical factor when processing the emotional content of natural scenes? Under challenging perceptual conditions, such as when pictures are briefly presented, color might facilitate scene segmentation and/or function as a semantic cue via association with scene‐relevant concepts (e.g., re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychophysiology 2012-01, Vol.49 (1), p.11-16
Main Authors: Codispoti, Maurizio, De Cesarei, Andrea, Ferrari, Vera
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affect - physiology
Arousal - physiology
Blood
Categorization
Cognitive psychology
Color
Color vision
EEG/ERP
Electroencephalography
Emotion
Emotions
Emotions - physiology
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Humans
Injuries
Male
Motivation
Orienting
Perception
Perception - physiology
Segmentation
Semantics
Sensory perception
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Summary:Is color a critical factor when processing the emotional content of natural scenes? Under challenging perceptual conditions, such as when pictures are briefly presented, color might facilitate scene segmentation and/or function as a semantic cue via association with scene‐relevant concepts (e.g., red and blood/injury). To clarify the influence of color on affective picture perception, we compared the late positive potentials (LPP) to color versus grayscale pictures, presented for very brief (24 ms) and longer (6 s) exposure durations. Results indicated that removing color information had no effect on the affective modulation of the LPP, regardless of exposure duration. These findings imply that the recognition of the emotional content of scenes, even when presented very briefly, does not critically rely on color information.
ISSN:0048-5772
1469-8986
1540-5958
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01284.x