ArticleRoyal Society open science2023
Effects of environmental colours in virtual reality: Physiological arousal affected by lightness and hue.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of Multisensory Environmental Cues on Food Craving, Healthy Food Preference, and Stress-Related Recovery.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Asymmetric effects of semantic compatibility and structural bridging on content propagation: evidence from community vernacular combinations on social media platforms.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The stability of colour-emotion associations across colour presentation modes and experimental settings.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Effects of workspace wall colors on productivity and emotion via immersive VR and physiological data.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Augmented State-Space Modeling and Control of Latent Arousal States Under Inhibitory and Excitatory Conditions.IEEE open journal of engineering in medicine and biology · 2026Article
- Contextual decoupling in color preference: multimodal evidence from spatial evaluation in makerspaces.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Analysis of the impact of different background colors in VR environments on risk preferences.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Free Association Database for a 62-Word Dataset Including Emotion and Colour Terms in English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and Spanish: Data from 14 Countries.Journal of open psychology data · 2025Article
- Text-to-image models reveal specific color-emotion associations.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Assessment of human emotional reactions to visual stimuli "deep-dreamed" by artificial neural networks.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Effects of environmental colours in virtual reality: Physiological arousal affected by lightness and hue.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Effects of color cues on eye-hand coordination training with a mirror drawing task in virtual environment.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation. We assessed participants' physiological responses (i.e. arousal) with heart rate and skin conductance measures, and their self-reported levels of valence and arousal in response to the coloured environments. The results revealed physiological effects of lightness and hue. When compared with the baseline measures, heart rate increased, and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark than the medium lightness rooms. Both measures signalled higher arousal in the darker room, irrespective of hue. Also, when compared with the baseline measures, skin conductance increased more in the red than the blue rooms, again signalling higher arousal in the red condition. The difference between the red and the blue conditions was detectable only on some saturation and lightness combinations. We conclude that being immersed in environments of different colours can change physiological arousal. However, not all changes are driven by hue and not all the effects are measurable on all physiological parameters.
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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.