Effects of Coloured Lighting on Judgement of Emotional Expression

The effects of environmental colours upon cognitive judgement were examined. Subjects were divided into three lighting conditions; white, red and blue. The individuals listened to short conversations between a man and a woman under the assigned colour lighting, and judged the degree of emotional expression of talkers for each conversation. Half of the conversations included emotional words in their scripts (E condition), and the other half did not (N condition). After finishing this task, subjects were asked to estimate the personality of talkers based on the impression of all conversations. The results showed that subjects in the red lighting condition judged talkers to be more emotional than subjects in the white lighting condition. This difference was found only in the N condition in which conversations did not include emotional words and the mean judgement score for emotional expression was lower than the E condition. As for the estimated personality of talkers, there were no significant differences among lighting conditions. These results showed both potentiality and limitation of the effect of environmental colours.