Understanding the Meaning of Color Environments: A Virtual Environment Exploratory Study

Color in one’s environment is known to bring emotional, social, and physiological reactions to people. Despite its significance, understanding meaning of color in environments is challenging mainly because of the difficulty in testing real color environments with virtually unlimited possible color combinations. As the context of color usage changes its impact on human responses, studying color and human responses has limited value if colors are isolated from actual environments (Mahnke, 1999; Hard & Sivik, 1999). To challenge these complications, this study explores Shigenobu Kobayashi’s color image scale with real-scale, high-fidelity computer simulations. The goal of this study is to provide a practical framework for empirical research on the psychological/emotional relationship between color environments and people’s perceptions of these environments. The study utilizes Kobayashi’s color theory (Kobayashi, 1981, 1987, 1990) focusing on the association of colors and words (i.e., adjectives) describing feelings and psychological emotions. Kobayashi provides a 180 “Image Word Database” of feelings connected to over 1000 color combinations devised by the use of multiple statistical analyses using the semantic differential method. While the large amount of color research has focused on emotional effects of single colors, the Color Image Scale deals with color combinations for practical application. During the last four decades,