Abstract
Do native speakers across various languages agree that certain colors represent discrete emotions (e.g., anger, fear, etc.)? In the current study, I examined whether native-English (n = 52), French (n = 26), Portuguese (n = 53), and Spanish (n = 48) speakers, as well as English-bilingual individuals (n = 50), agreed on what colors (presented as twenty-eight color swatches) represented a set of twenty emotions (written as words). Specifically, I investigated whether there was shared agreement (i.e. consistency and specificity) among color-emotion pairings both within and across the four languages and bilinguals. Overall, I did not find widespread-shared agreement within or across languages, with few exceptions: native-English, Portuguese, and Spanish speakers consistently paired the color red with love while only English speakers consistently paired the color gray with disappointment. Furthermore, dark red was specific to anger, green to envy, and light red to love, but only for native-English speakers. No color- emotion pairings were both specific and consistent in any language or among bilinguals. In addition, I found that how a language labels a color better predicts emotion-color agreement than the physical properties of the color. My findings are consistent with the Theory of Constructed Emotion in which there are no diagnostic features specific to each emotion: Rather emotions are created when perceivers use their conceptual knowledge, including language, to place more rudimentary information into discrete categories.