‘Blue Monday’ was a term coined back in 2005, marking the unhappiest day of the year. It was based on calculations linked to post-Christmas debt, the gloomy weather and not sticking to New Year’s resolutions. But why we do we associate the colour ‘blue’ with feelings of sadness and melancholy? Researchers at the University of Sussex have shown that blue is in fact on average people’s favourite colour.
The Sussex Colour Group & Baby Lab in the School of Psychology conduct research which looks at human colour vision and perception, aiming to understand how we see and what we think about colour.
Over the years, Prof Anna Franklin and Dr Alice Skelton have researched how colour perception develops as we age, and to what extent our preferences are innate. Their research acknowledges that there is evidence that infants look longer at visual stimuli that adults prefer, for example, infants look at more attractive faces for longer than unattractive faces. With this in mind, Prof Franklin and Dr Skelton carried out research to see how long infants looked at different colours and how much adults like those colours too.
For this study, the researchers recorded how long infants aged 4-6 months old looked at different colours, and also asked adults to rate how much they liked each colour.
Prof Franklin and Dr Skelton found that babies tend to look longer at colours that adults prefer, with infants looking nearly twice as long at blue-er hues than dark yellow-ish ones. The colours that were preferred also tended to be those that particularly activated a sensory process behind how we see colour— one that helps us sense how "blue" something is.
One theory about why this might be is that blue things, like clear skies and clean water, have been good for us across evolution, while things that are yellowish, for example rotting fruit or human waste, are things that we might want to avoid.
Despite this, historically blue hasn’t been seen as a positive colour. In China for example,it represents torment and death, it’s solemn. During the years of 1901-1904, when Picaso was suffering from depression, the colour blue came to dominate his paintings, and the Western world often refers to ‘feeling blue’ when describing experiences of unhappiness.
Prof Anna Franklin says:
“Although blue has some negative connotations, such as an association with sadness, our research shows that it is in fact a colour that we respond positively to. While we know that there are many factors that contribute to colour preferences, our research showed that there was a high degree of similarity between how long infants looked at the colours and how much they are liked by adults. Infants looked longest at the blue hues which adults preferred.
“Blue is the ocean, the sky, and other research suggests that the colour blue can even enhance creativity.”