Consistent or Inconsistent... the links between colour and emotion are strikingly similar!

Lindborg, P. and Friberg, A., K., (2015) ‘Colour association with Music is Mediated by Emotion: Evidence from an Experiment Using a CIE Lab Interface and Interviews’. PLOS One. 10(12). Crossmark. [Online] Available at: http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:871801/FULLTEXT01.pdf (Accessed 15/01/2017)

The literature identifies at least four mechanisms whereby crossmodal association can emerge, roughly corresponding to levels of neural processing in the brain. More importantly the colours selected are similar suggesting maybe that the scientifically consistent are more or less in line with the inconsistent. ["Everbody has to a greater of lesser degree synaesthetic abilities." (Ray.S, 2017) how pretentious is that!!]

STRUCTURED First, at the level of sensory information, crossmodal association can be determined by structural correspondences based on commonalities in the way neurons code sensory stimulation.

ECOLOGICAL The second class of crossmodal association is based on the principles of statistical co-occurrence and ecological perception. Stimuli perceived simultaneously through different sensory organs and via parallel neurons might become associated at an intermediate point in the neural processing path if they both increase an organism’s level of alertness or arousal, or if they both happen to have the same effect on emotional state, mood, or affective state. In evolutionary terms, such associations may have arisen as part of a strategy for the brain to optimise co-varying sensory input, and then may gradually have become hard-wired.

LEARNED Third, at the cognitive level, crossmodal association is learned consciously. Its effects are available to the individual for inspection, as well as, to some degree, for control and training. In as much as learning can be understood as an individual’s acquisition of methods to decode the communication system of her social environment, this mechanism is based on language. This kind of crossmodal association favours semantically mediated correspondences based on a descriptive terminology that is common between modalities. We believe that this mechanism is deeply connected with listening intentionality.

EMOTION A fourth way that crossmodal association might arise is via emotion at a pre-cognitive level. The proposition that emotion processing has a role to play in crossmodal correspondences is not new but, as stated in [2], empirical evidence has been lacking. A recent study showed that people’s liking of basic food tastes such as bitter or sweet predicted their crossmodal association of shapes such as angular or rounded with taste ; especially suggesting a hedonic mediation effect). In music emotion research, Palmer and collaborators claimed that experimental results provided “clear evidence of cross-modal correspondences based on emotion”