Abstract
BackgroundAs part of our research programme into facilitating improved ways of communicating with patients, especially about more sensitive clinical issues, we have been investigating whether there are any non-verbal methods that might aid this process. One such approach is to ask patients to choose a color in response to a particular question, for instance about health or psychological status, and for this purpose we developed the Manchester Color Wheel (MCW). This instrument consists of positive, neutral and negative colors and its validation in normal adults and those with anxiety or depression showed that it is responsive to change and reproducible. It also has the capacity to identify a positive frame of mind. We concluded that it might be a particularly useful instrument in adolescents and therefore this study aimed to validate it in a secondary school.Methods620 pupils (aged 11–17 years, mean age 14.0 years, 298 (48.1%) males, 322 (51.9%) females) at Sale Grammar School in Greater Manchester were asked to relate their mood to a MCW color and also complete the Hospital Anxiety Depression (HAD) questionnaire. To give these pupils an experience in science, 197 were divided into four subgroups for an ‘experiment’ to ascertain whether, compared to controls, a change in mood color choice could be induced by participation in sport, music or art activities.ResultsAlthough mood color and HAD depression score are unlikely to be measuring exactly the same psychological state, a negative mood color was chosen by 62.5% of HAD depressed compared to only 14.5% of HAD normal pupils (p < 0.001). In contrast, a positive mood color was chosen by 48.9% of normal and only 18.8% of depressed pupils (p < 0.001). In the ‘experiment’, compared to controls, all activities resulted in an increased choice of positive mood colors which reached significance for sport and music.ConclusionThis study confirms the potential utility of the MCW to rapidly and easily assess a variety of health issues in large populations, including adolescents. Some of our results should also be of interest to educationalists.
Highlights
As part of our research programme into facilitating improved ways of communicating with patients, especially about more sensitive clinical issues, we have been investigating whether there are any non-verbal methods that might aid this process
We have found that how individuals respond to questions in terms of color can have a range of applications [3]. For the latter purpose we developed the ‘Manchester Color Wheel’ (MCW) as a simple way of presenting 38 different shades of color to an individual, so that their color choice could be related to their health or psychological status (Figure 1) [3]
The reasons they gave for choosing this color were because they were feeling ‘happy’, ‘in a good mood’, ‘very happy, excited and proud’, ‘because it’s like sunshine and I’m happy’, ‘bright and cheerful’ and ‘it’s my birthday tomorrow and I’m happy’. 73 (59.8%) of the 122 Hospital Anxiety and Depression (HAD) anxious participants associated a color with their mood, with 12 (16.4%) choosing ‘Blue 28’ giving reasons such as, ‘I’m calm and cold’, ‘I’m a bit sad’, ‘I’m sad at the moment’ and ‘peaceful’. 16 (44.4%) of the 36 HAD depressed participants associated their mood with a color with 4 (25%) choosing ‘Black 33’ giving reasons such as, ‘I don’t have many friends’, ‘feeling sad and slightly depressed’, ‘tired’ and ‘not very happy’
Summary
As part of our research programme into facilitating improved ways of communicating with patients, especially about more sensitive clinical issues, we have been investigating whether there are any non-verbal methods that might aid this process One such approach is to ask patients to choose a color in response to a particular question, for instance about health or psychological status, and for this purpose we developed the Manchester Color Wheel (MCW). In further studies we have shown, that when patients are asked to relate their disease rather than their mood to a color, they associate it with a negative shade irrespective of whether it gets better or not, whereas their mood color becomes positive when symptoms improve [4] Another useful application of the MCW is that, in contrast to standard questionnaires to identify anxiety or depression, it can be used in a more constructive way to detect a positive frame of mind
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