Lijing Guo^1,2 (), Hongjin Sun³, Taosheng Liu⁴, Dan Nie², Penglan Liu², Weizhen Xie⁵, Chaoxiong Ye^1,2; ¹School of Education, Anyang Normal University, Anyang, China, ²Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland, ³Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, ⁴Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States, ⁵Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

Colour is not only a perceptual attribute but can also carry emotional implications. Previous research has shown that people tend to associate specific colours with particular emotions, with red being associated with anger. However, the implication of red could possibly also be culturally specific as in Chinese culture, red is often associated with positive emotions such as joy and celebration. The present study aimed to examine whether, within a bivalent cultural context, red activates both associations simultaneously (coexistence hypothesis) or engages one over the other (competition hypothesis). Experiment 1 examined both Chinese and Canadian participants in a facial emotion identification task using either White and East Asian facial images. Participants were asked to rapidly identify angry and happy emotions presented against a red, green, or gray background. Using the reaction time measure, we found that a red background significantly facilitated the identification of angry emotion and had little effect on the identification of happy emotions among participants from both countries. These findings support the competition hypothesis rather than the coexistence hypothesis. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern in a new sample of Chinese participants under reduced perceptual salience of the display. Experiment 3 further replicated the effect despite variation of stimulus factors, such as background size (full-screen vs. local). Overall, we consistently demonstrated red-anger association across three experiments, which was not moderated by the racial profile of the emotional faces, participants’ cultural background, or sensory-level factors. These consistent findings highlight the robustness of the red–anger association in visual-emotion processing. These consistent findings highlight the robust impact of conceptual association between color and affect (e.g., red and anger) in visual-emotion processing - a potential indication of cognitive penetrability of visual perception.

Acknowledgements: Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland (former Academy of Finland) Academy Research Fellow project (#355369 to Chaoxiong Ye) and Finnish Cultural Foundation (#231373 to Chaoxiong Ye).