The colors of feelings: Jev vs 7,387 people

Which color goes with anger, joy, shame or relief, and which feeling goes with each color? Does Jev pair them the way people in 31 countries do?

result32 questions

Jev picks people's most common color for 7 of 20 feelings (joy yellow, anger red, fear black, love red...) and their second choice for 3 more. It breaks from them on relief (blue; people: white), interest (yellow; people: green), disappointment (blue; people: grey) and, most tellingly, sadness: blue for Jev, black for people. Going from color to feeling, it matches people's top feeling for 7 of 12 colors.

	people’s top color	Jev’s
joy	yellow	yellow ✓
amusement	orange	yellow
love	red	red ✓
fear	black	black ✓
contentment	green	green ✓
relief	white	blue
interest	green	yellow
anger	red	red ✓
hate	black	red
disappointment	grey	blue
admiration	blue	purple
compassion	white	green
shame	black	red
contempt	black	black ✓
pride	blue	purple
disgust	brown	green
regret	grey	grey ✓
guilt	black	grey
sadness	black	blue
pleasure	pink	yellow

How to read this: One row per feeling: people's most common color next to Jev's pick, with a check mark where they match.

20 emotions and 12 colors; people's top color carries 21% of associations on average.

In short

Jev gets the loudest links right (joy yellow, anger red) but gives people's top color for only 7 of 20 feelings.
Where it departs it tends to follow English idioms, with sadness blue for Jev (100% sure) and black for people, and disgust green rather than brown.
From color to feeling it matches people for 7 of 12 colors; red is anger for Jev, love for people.

What the data shows

Unsettled Tom meme: The world: sadness is black. Jev: sadness is blue. — The world: sadness is black. Jev: sadness is blue.

The strong links match: joy yellow, anger red, love red, fear black, contentment green, contempt black, regret grey. Jev is very sure of the loud ones (joy and anger, 100%).
Close seconds: for amusement Jev says yellow (people: orange, then yellow), for hate red (people: black, then red), for guilt grey (people: black, then grey).
Sadness is blue for Jev, black for people: Jev puts all its weight on blue; the 31 countries' most common color is black, then grey. "Feeling blue" is an English idiom; it isn't the world's color of sadness.
Disgust is green for Jev, brown for people. And from color to feeling, Jev calls brown "contentment" where people say disgust.
Pride and admiration are purple for Jev, blue for people.
Color to feeling: 7 of 12 match (grey sadness, white relief, green contentment, orange joy, pink love, black sadness, yellow joy). Red is anger for Jev, love for people.

What it means, and what it doesn't

Jev knows the universal color-emotion links, and where it differs, it often follows English idioms and symbolism (blue sadness, green disgust, purple pride) rather than what people across 31 countries actually report. For design or copy aimed at a global audience, that's an English accent in its color sense.

People picked many colors per feeling and Jev one, so only the top picks compare fairly. For which country's associations Jev resembles most, see "Whose colors of feelings does Jev have?".

Caveats

People could pick several, Jev picks one. In the survey, people ticked which of 20 feelings go with a color and could tick as many as they liked. Jev chose one color per feeling. So only the top picks are comparable; Jev's answers look far more certain by design.
English color words. Jev saw the question in English. Some associations are English idioms ("feeling blue", "green with envy") rather than universal ones, and the survey's people came from 31 countries.
The top color is often a weak favorite. People's most common color carries only about a fifth of the associations on average. "Missing" the top color often means picking a close second, which is why second choices are also counted.
Twelve color words, not colors. The survey used color terms (red, turquoise, brown...), not color patches, so this is about color words and their connotations.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes81%
Does it describe you?: No65%
Would you have predicted it?: No51%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is reasonable
How much should a reader rely on it?: Moderately
Which caveat matters most?: People could pick several, Jev picks one65%

Why ask this

Anger is red. Sadness is... blue, or black, or grey, depending on who you ask. People's color-emotion links are among the most widely shared associations people have, and they shape design, marketing, flags and poetry. Many are shared across cultures; some aren't.

A model learned its colors from text, much of it English. It might reproduce the universal links, sharpen English clichés, or miss the quieter associations people share.

How this was done

The people and the data

The International Colour-Emotion Association Survey (Jonauskaite and colleagues, 2020) asked 7,387 people in 31 countries which of 20 feelings they associate with each of 12 color terms: red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, purple, pink, brown, black, grey and white. The data is public under a CC BY license. For each feeling, the data gives what share of all its color associations went to each color. The favorites are weak: people's top color for a feeling carries 21% of its associations on average.

What Jev was asked

For each feeling, which color goes with it:

Which color do you associate most with the feeling "relief"?
red · blue · grey · pink · black · brown · green · white · orange · purple · yellow · turquoise

and for each color, which of the 20 feelings goes with it. That's 32 questions, each with the options in three shuffled orders, averaged, and each also asked for "most people".

How it was measured

Whether Jev's top color is people's top color for each feeling, whether it's their second choice, and the same in the other direction (color to feeling).

Where these questions live

32 questions across 1 topic of the map. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Emotion

Colors of Emotions32

Every question

All 32 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

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