Cognitively Congruent Color Palettes for Mapping Spatial Emotional Data. Matching Colors to Emotions.

Emotions are touchstones of humans’ everyday life experiences. Maps of emotions inform a variety of research from urban planning and disaster response to marketing studies. Emotions are most often shown on maps with colors. Previous research suggests that humans have subjective associations between colors and emotions that impact objective task performance. Thus, a mismatch between the emotion associated with a color and the emotion it represents may bias the viewer’s attention, perception, and understanding of the map. There are no guidelines that can help cartographers and designers choose matching colors to display spatial emotional data. This study aimed to address this gap by suggesting cognitively congruent color palettes—color sets matched to emotions in a way that is aligned with color-emotion associations. To obtain the set of candidate congruent colors and identify appropriate color-to-emotion assignments, two user experiments were conducted with participants in the United States. In the first, participants picked a representative color for 23 discrete emotions. In the second experiment, for each candidate color from a set derived from the results of the first experiment, participants selected the best-matching emotions. The probability of the emotion being selected served as a measure of how representative the color is of that emotion. Due to the many-to-many nature of associations between colors and emotions, suitable color choices were incorporated into a dynamic palette generation tool. This tool solves the color assignment problem and produces a suitable color palette depending on the combination of selected emotions.