“Warm,” “cool,” and the colors

Abstract

Participants judged affective cooler/warmer gradients around a 12-step color circle. Each pair of adjacent colors was presented twice (left–right reversed), all in random order. Participants readily performed the task, but their settings do not correlate very well. Individual responses were compared with a small number of canonical templates. For a little less than one-half of the participants responses or judgements correlate with such a template. We find a warm pole (in the orange environment) and a cool pole (in the teal environment) connected with two tracks that tend to have one or more gaps or weak, even inverted links. We conclude that the common artistic cool–warm polarity is only weakly reflected in responses of our observers. If it does, the observers apparently use categorical warm and cool poles and may be uncertain in relating adjacent hue steps along the 12-step color circle.