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The meaning of colors according to Vietnamese students
A survey was given to 85 Vietnamese students of the ages between 18 and 22 years old. They were given a paper as below. One column listed the following colors: black, white, purple, yellow, pink, blue, red, orange and green. In a second column was listed the following emotions: love, justice, fear, anger, sadness, curiosity, hope, honesty and enthusiasm.
An example of the exercise can be seen in the picture below. Students were told to match in a non-exclusive and non-inclusive way. This means that a color could have one or more meanings or no meaning at all. The same was told about the emotions, that they could have one, many or no color at all.
The result is displayed in the table in the next page. What shown was that the most meaningful emotion are love (with 82 votes) and the most meaningful color is blue (with 83 votes).
Love is considered pink (with 42 votes) but also red (with 29 votes).
It is interesting to realize that red has two opposite meanings which are love (25) and anger (35). Yes, love and hate have the same colour!
Justice is mostly seen as white with 32 votes.
Fear is mostly black with 33 votes.
Sadness has 2 colors as it got 27 votes for black and 23 votes for purple.
Curiosity isn’t a colorful emotion as its highest vote was only of 13 with the color orange.
Honesty is seen as white with 18 votes.
And Enthusiasm is yellow, with 22 votes, and orange, with 17 votes.
To better picture the results, we can take a look at the graph below:
When kids see the famous McDonald's arches on a red background, the yellow color may make them remember the color of french fries dipping in Ketchup.​ But for them red is the color of ketchup. It's got nothing to do with the "Red Army".
The "Red Army" is the name given to the Soviet Army. The color scheme of Yellow symbols over a Red background is also famous for being used by the USSR representing communism. The same color scheme is used by the Socialist Republics of Vietnam and China.
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But is that a contradiction?
And had anyone ever noticed that or has it only been me???
McDonald's has been using the same color code communism has been using just like in the flags of the Soviet Union, China and also Vietnam.
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But does that mean that McDonald's has been communist all this time and that no one ever noticed it? McDonald's is one of the symbols of capitalism and they have been using the colors of their antagonistic ideology.
One quick conclusion may just be that we assign colors to what we want. And neither McDonald's nor Communism has the monopoly over yellow and red!
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We, intuitively, want to assign symbolic meanings to colors. I recently organized a survey to identify what meanings young Vietnamese students assigned to colors. Love was mostly Pink but also Red. Red also symbolized Anger which, we may then deduct, are two sides of the same coin - the love and hate coin.
The results also showed that:
- Hope was Blue.
- White was associated to Justice and Honesty.
- Black was associated to Fear and Sadness.
- And Sadness was also linked to Purple.
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But, these are averages of a group survey. Colors may have different meanings depending on the individual, the mood and the context. In 1927, the Time magazine published an article stating that "boys should wear pink and girls blue". According to the author, pink was a stronger color thus better suited to boys. And blue was seen as more "delicate", so good for girls. We now know that things have changed. The consensus is quite strong with blue for boys and pink for girls. But maybe that consensus is about to change once again! We are now in the 21st century. Things are changing ...
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