The Influence Of Environmental Colour On Moral Judgement

The world is filled with different colours which make our life rich and beautiful.Previous psychological researches show that colours have different effects on our physiological and psychological feelings.Previous studies have proved that colour has impact on moral judgment.But most of them only focus on manipulating the colours of the target word or subject but not the colour of the context.However,environmental color is an important perceptual information in our life,and also has an influence on cognitive processing.Therefore,the aim of the present study is to investigate the role of environmental colour in moral cognition,explore the neural mechanism and provide empirical support for the colour design of two-dimensional and three-dimensional environment.This study consists of two experiments.In the first experiment,we use moral Stroop paradigm to investigate the effect of the background colour on moral cognitive processing.The second experiment uses the event-related potential(ERP)technique to identify the temporal dynamics and neuro mechanism under the impact of the colours of lights on moral judgement.Our experimental results are as followed:(1)The behavioural results show that compared with red,blue or black,it takes longer for individuals to judge immoral words than moral words when the view background of the computer screen was coloured green and white,which reveals the metaphor connection between the concept of moral and colour white and green.However,in the three-dimensional environment,the lights' colour has no behavioral effect on moral judgement,which indicates that different dimensions of background colour information have different effect on moral judgement.(2)The ERP results reveal the temporal course of the effect of the lights' colour on moral judgement.First,the main effects of the lights' colours and moral types on the amplitudes of P200 suggested that during this stage,the processing of basic visual features and the processing of moral concept may be parallel.Second,there is no significant colours' impact on N300,which indexes the integration of perceptual information with semantic processing.Finally,the later stage involves moral evaluation and reasoning process,which was indexed by the interaction of the lights' colours,moral type and brain area on LPC.The present study investigated the influence of different working environment colours(the colours of computer screen and the colours of lights)on moral processing,which fills the blank of the influence of environmental color on moral cognition from the traditional research.Besides,our study demonstrated the connection between environmental colour and the moral conceptual metaphor in terms of neural mechanism.These findings provide inspiration and empirical support for the two-dimensional interfacial design(such as warning signs,web pages,etc.)and the three-dimensional lighting environment design(such as courts,prisons,auditing and other legal or financial venues).