When the skies are grey, the colour yellow seems to be a key to happiness, and especially in colder, wetter northern countries.
A survey of emotions towards colours polled 6,625 people from 55 countries and focused on reactions to the colour yellow. Those emotions were weighed up against the hours of sunshine, hours of daylight, yearly rainfall, latitude and other external factors in their environment.
The strongest indicators of people’s joy of yellow were the yearly rainfall and their latitude, as reported in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. The farther someone lived from the equator, the more likely they were to appreciate bright hues. So in Egypt, the chance of yellow being linked with joy was 5.7%, but in Finland it was 87.7%, and in the US people’s yellow-joy association levels were between 60 and 70%. So, the joy of yellow appears to be a phenomenon of colder and rainier climates in more northerly latitudes. This link might be because yellow is a reminder of sun and warmth, although one surprise is that it did not depend on seasons.
The survey of feelings about colours across the world is continuing – click here to take part in the poll.
