What's in a Color? A neuropsycholinguistic study on the effect of colors on EEG brainwaves, immediate emotional responses, and English language vocabulary retention among Iranian young adults

Abstract

The present stud y is an attempt to investigate the emotional responses to the eight colors (black, white, yellow, blue, red, green, orange, and violet) in terms of three emotional response systems (physiology, behavior, and psychology) on twenty volunteered young adults, both male and female in Qom –Iran. Experiments are undertaken in three different contexts measuring the participants’ reactions to colors via neuroimaging tests, color-emotion and color-word association questionnaires, and English language vocabulary tests to find out how the individuals react when exposed to different colors, especially in linguistic phase. The total results illustrated that students would benefit from colorful vocabularies over black and white ones; and the three colors blue, orange, and red over the other colors. Totally, color backgrounds and foregrounds function similarly. However, it was discovered that vocabularies were memorized in blue foreground. Recalling vocabularies in yellow and violet is better to be avoided. The findings of this research benefits students and teachers in teaching and learning vocabularies in educational settings. It also contributes to the literature on color psychology and neurology and more specifically, it provides literature on the effect of color on arousal and memory.