Really? I thought it was one of those low-evidence beliefs. Consider http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933460/ :

> Recent research has shown that the color red influences psychological functioning. Red is hypothesized to be linked to aggression and danger in evolution, and these links are enhanced by culture-specific uses of red. Thus, color meanings are thought to be grounded in biologically based proclivities and learned associations. However, to date, there has been no direct evidence for the influence of experience on the red effect. This study focused on whether experience could change the psychological effects of the color red. In the context of the Chinese stock market, contrary to the meaning generally associated with red as negative and green as positive, red represents a rise in stock price and green stands for a decrease. An experiment using a 2×2 between subjects factorial design demonstrated that red (compared with green) impaired Chinese college students’ performance on an IQ test (in accordance with the red effect), but the opposite effect was found among stockbrokers. These results provide direct evidence of learned color meanings, in support of the general model of color effect. ...

which suggests that red has a non-trivial learned color meaning on people, and leaving open the possibility that it's mostly, if not all, culturally based.

Or consider http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20677892 :

> in a series of 7 experiments we demonstrate that women perceive men to be more attractive and sexually desirable when seen on a red background and in red clothing, and we additionally show that status perceptions are responsible for this red effect.

They hypothesize that red is not a general signal of danger, but has many meanings. NOTE! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23398185 points out that there's likely publication bias in this experiment, so there might be no signal. I bring up the study anyway to point out that many people have different interpretations for the "evolutionary emergence", and the evidence is low.

Or consider http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23148465 :

> Claims of universality pervade color preference research. It has been argued that there are universal preferences for some colors over others (e.g., Eysenck, 1941), universal sex differences (e.g., Hurlbert & Ling, 2007), and universal mechanisms or dimensions that govern these preferences (e.g., Palmer & Schloss, 2010). However, there have been surprisingly few cross-cultural investigations of color preference and none from nonindustrialized societies that are relatively free from the common influence of global consumer culture. Here, we compare the color preferences of British adults to those of Himba adults who belong to a nonindustrialized culture in rural Namibia. British and Himba color preferences are found to share few characteristics, and Himba color preferences display none of the so-called "universal" patterns or sex differences.

Since you say that there is a "fair amount of literature" on this topic, can you point it out? I've not been able to find anything rigorous which supports your statement. Certainly nothing which is stronger than that last citation.