Colour-emotion association study on abstract art painting

Most art paintings especially abstract art are created to evoke an emotional feeling in the viewer. Colour as a dominant low-level feature plays a significant role in visual perception. Colours can bring out different emotional feelings and the findings from several psychology studies have shown bright colours generally relate to positive emotions, whereas dark colours relate to negative emotions. This paper focuses on the study of relationships between colours and emotionson abstract art images. In this work, the colour featurevectors were extracted from images using the fuzzy colour histogram method, whereas emotion typevectors were obtained from a user rating study done on an abstract art imagedataset. Ourstudy shows that some emotion types have highly significant association with certain colours. For example, the fear emotion has a positive correlation with the colour black with a significant value of p < 0.01.