Beyond Associations Between Color and Emotion: A Scoping Review of Task-Based Evidence on Color Properties, Emotional Attention, and Cognitive Control

Color may influence emotional cognition through perceptual salience, learned affective meaning, and response compatibility, yet task-based evidence has not been synthesized. Reported under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and the PRISMA extension for reporting literature searches (PRISMA-S), we conducted a scoping review of experiments that varied color during emotional attention, cognitive control, or emotional information processing. Five database groups were searched on 26 July 2026 and rerun as a pre-submission update on 17 August 2026; three completed citation-searching rounds were also used. Independent screening yielded 299 included reports. Full-text charting organized these reports into 294 study families and 4923 descriptive result rows. Reported result directions varied across color properties, task roles, emotional materials, comparators, and response levels. Most families contained detected and null results, while 44 internally conflicting rows were retained for descriptive analysis. Although 569 rows from 43 families provided directly weightable effect estimates, no cluster met prespecified homogeneity criteria, so effects were not pooled. In applied settings, color sometimes changed gaze, local task performance, or affect, but transfer to beliefs, sustained attention, or general performance was inconsistent. This descriptive mapping does not establish a general performance benefit or impairment for any named color. Conflict and inhibition paradigms rarely manipulated saturation or lightness independently, leaving a specific design gap in research on color and cognitive control.