Articlei-Perception
Color Affects Recognition of Emoticon Expressions.
Article in i-Perception. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Seeing Through Feeling: Dynamic Interplay Between Emotion and Visual Perception.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- The association between emotional arousal and color lightness of facial digital expressions of social robots.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The lexicalization of emojis: the influence of frequency and functions of emojis in sentences on this process-a study based on eye movement tracking.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Drawing as a window to emotion with insights from tech-transformed participant images.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In computer-mediated communication, emoticons are conventionally rendered in yellow. Previous studies demonstrated that colors evoke certain affective meanings, and face color modulates perceived emotion. We investigated whether color variation affects the recognition of emoticon expressions. Japanese participants were presented with emoticons depicting four basic emotions (Happy, Sad, Angry, Surprised) and a Neutral expression, each rendered in eight colors. Four conditions (E1-E4) were employed in the lab-based experiment; E5, with an additional participant sample, was an online replication of the critical E4. In E1, colored emoticons were categorized in a 5AFC task. In E2-E5, stimulus affective meaning was assessed using visual scales with anchors corresponding to each emotion. The conditions varied in stimulus arrays: E2: light gray emoticons; E3: colored circles; E4 and E5: colored emoticons. The affective meaning of Angry and Sad emoticons was found to be stronger when conferred in warm and cool colors, respectively, the pattern highly consistent between E4 and E5. The affective meaning of colored emoticons is regressed to that of achromatic expression counterparts and decontextualized color. The findings provide evidence that affective congruency of the emoticon expression and the color it is rendered in facilitates recognition of the depicted emotion, augmenting the conveyed emotional message.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.