The Effects of Color Hue-Tone on Recognizing Emotions of Characters in the Film, Les Misérables

Abstract

This study investigated whether people experience a correspondence between color hue-tone and the main characters’ emotions in the 2012 British musical drama film, Les Miserables through three practical experiments. Six screen images, which represent the characters’ different emotions (Parrot’s six primary types including love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear) were selected. For each screen image, participants were asked to judge the degree of the character’s dominant emotions evoked from 17 varied screen images, which consisted of original chromatic and achromatized images as well as 15 color-filtered images (5 hues X 3 tones of the IRI color system). These tasks revealed that a chromatic color scheme is more effective to deliver the characters’ positive emotions (i.e. love and joy) than an achromatic one. In addition, they proved that the hue and tone dimensions partially influence the relationships between the character emotions and colors.