Pastel color does not modulate viewers’ emotions in audiovisual projects

The use of color in audiovisual projects, specifically film, TV, and advertising, involves associations at different levels: physical, psychological, and esthetic. To our knowledge, the specific impact of pastel colors on viewers had not been studied by comparing them to saturated colors based on paired color productions. In this work, we aimed to approach differences in the emotions perceived by viewers when watching audiovisual projects produced with pastel colors compared with those produced with saturated colors. We hypothesized that the pastel color, due to its characteristic of being a soft color, evokes emotions with less intensity than saturated colors. To study this, we created 12 videos, six with a saturated color production design and six with a pastel color production design, evoking six basic emotions: disgust, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We presented these videos to 310 people distributed in two groups (half of them watched the saturated videos and half the pastel videos) and asked them to indicate how these six emotions were evoked. We only found significant differences in 4 out of the 36 comparisons made (11.11%), in videos representing disgust and anger. With those results, we did not find that pastel color in audiovisual projects clearly influences the audience’s emotional perception. We conclude that to evoke emotions in the audience, additional elements to color are necessary, such as music, camera shots or lighting. This research brings more knowledge to how pastel color in images, particularly those of an audiovisual nature, can be used to evoke emotions in the audience.