The effect of chromatic and achromatic color schemes on children’s emotions in a preschool classroom

Color is salient design element that can influence people's behaviours and emotions in the interior space, it can also trigger specific physical and psychological responses in human beings. Therefore, its proper use in the interior space can lead to positive outcomes such as creating a healthier environment. In that regard, this research examines the effect of chromatic and achromatic color schemes on color-emotion associations in children in the interior space of a general classroom. The goal of this study is determining whether the responses caused by color are strong enough to create a positive or negative emotion in a child. Furthermore, saturation maybe more effective than hue in determining whether a color is calming or exciting, in addition, children prefer brighter and more saturated colors to less saturated ones. In that sense, high and low saturated blue, high and low saturated red as chromatic colors and high and low saturated grey and white were selected as achromatic colors. This study was conducted on eighty preschool children with 5 years of age, from two private preschools in Ankara, Turkey. Photographic simulations were used as the tool to create different views of the classrooms and the children were asked to match each view to one facial expression representing anger, sadness, neutral and happiness. The results indicated that classrooms with high saturated blue, low saturated red and white as the wall colors elicited positive emotions in the child while the rest were associated with either negative emotions or no emotions at all.