Color and Personality: Strong's Interest Inventory and Cattell's 16PF

Three studies addressed the relation between color preference and personality, based on subsets of respondents from a pool of volunteers who participated in a series of Career Transition Clinics provided by an Atlanta, GA church. It was hypothesized that the mostly inconclusive findings of earlier research are primarily due to the piecemeal nature of the analysis afforded by standard statistical method. Hence, the central data analyses were performed using a neural net approach. Study I (n = 885) showed that the Strong's Basic Interest Scales (BIS) could be predicted reliably (Median r = 0.68) from the Dewey Color System Test, while Study II (n = 1010) showed slightly weaker correlations when predicting respondents' scores on the Cattell's 16PF (Median r = 0.51). Consistent with earlier research, study III (n = 1245) indicated that yellow was preferred more by women than by men. Also, as was hypothesized, our results suggest that previous research was inconclusive due to many-to-one nature of the relation between color choices and personality. Unfortunately, our neural nets could not fully exploit sex related patterns of color preference differences so as to identify meaningful differences between men and women. ********** Color is an important aspect of our efforts to create personal spaces to our own liking. Yet, little is known about why people like or dislike the colors they do. This paper asks whether people's color preferences reflect meaningful information about their personalities, interpersonal styles, and behaviors. Surprisingly, relatively little research has been done to investigate the links between such variables and individuals' color preferences. The research summarized here represents our efforts to identify links between people's color preferences and their personal characteristics as derived from two well-established psychological inventories. From a practical perspective, the use of color preference tests promises to assess personality and occupational qualifications such that the stimuli have no perceived face validity to the respondents. In other words, the purpose of administering the test will not be apparent to respondents as they do not know how their color preferences relate to their personality characteristics or occupational proclivities. Color preference tests thus have similar potential advantages to Cattell's classical culture fair tests (CFIT, Cattell, 1949), i.e., they promise to eliminate any social or cultural advantages, or disadvantages, that a person may have due to their upbringing or cultural background. Also, the test can be administered regardless of the test taker's native language, thus obviating the need for translation, recalibrating, renorming, etc. Likewise, issues of socially desirable responding should be less of a concern than in standard paper-and-pencil tests, thereby decreasing response bias. At the most basic level, color has been shown to affect our mood, thereby affecting the way we interact with our environment. A growing body of research in environmental psychology has shown that the color of a room or work setting can have profound effects on individual enjoyment and performance on a variety of tasks. For instance, Stone (2003) showed that task performance varied as a function of the color of the room in which the task was performed. In another study by Stone (2001), positive mood tended to be higher when individuals worked in a blue carrel compared to a red carrel. Performance is also affected because individuals read slower and comprehended less when performing a reading task in a red environment. This study thus provides direct evidence that color has an effect on cognitive performance, suggesting that the cognitive impairments produced by color could be driven by physiological arousal. Indeed, Stone's (2003) findings indicate that the color red increased individuals' levels of arousal, which when paired with a stimulating task, caused deficits in cognitive performance. …