Universal models of colour emotion and colour harmony

A new set of quantitative models of colour emotion and colour harmony were developed in this study using psychophysical data collected from 12 regions in the world, including Argentina, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the UK. These data have previously been published in journals or conferences (for details see Tables and ). For colour emotion, three new models were derived, showing satisfactory predictive performance in terms of an average correlation coefficient of 0.78 for warm/cool, 0.80 for heavy/light and 0.81 for active/passive. The new colour harmony model also had satisfactory predictive performance, with an average correlation coefficient of 0.72. Principal component analysis shows that the common colour harmony principles, including hue similarity, chroma similarity, lightness difference and high lightness principles, were partly agreed by observers of the same region. The findings suggest that it is feasible to develop universal models of colour emotion and colour harmony, and that the former was found to be relatively more culture-independent than the latter.