Pairings of colors with emotions in Turkish

Metaphorical expressions can imply the associations between colors and emotions within a specific language. For instance, tying black (karalar bağlamak) (Bas & Buyukkantarcıoglu, 2019) or withering away (sararıp solmak) are used for sadness in Turkish. The study aims to see the relationship between colors and emotions. Eleven basic color terms in Turkish which were red, blue, green, yellow, black, white, purple, pink, orange, and grey and six basic emotions which were anger, sadness, happiness, surprise, disgust, and fear used to see associations between colors and emotions. In the first set of experiments (1/A and 1/B), participants performed the matching emotion words with colors task. In the second set of studies (2/A and 2/B), participants were required to perform matching emoji–like faces with colors tasks. Initially, 780 individuals were recruited through snowball sampling. However, 389 of the participants left the study. Therefore, 391 individuals were investigated for primary analyses. According to the results, seven found associations were aligned with the previous literature. These were anger with red and black, sadness with black and white, surprise with yellow and white, and fear with black. However, the level of agreement among raters was low. In addition, results were significant in conditions where the emotion has presented in either word or emoji-like formats in the initial phase. Lastly, experiments that included emoji faces showed slightly better results on which emotion and color were most associated. Future studies should re-run this experimental procedure with a larger sample size to establish a firm conclusion.